“I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.”

Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.

My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and gives the whole show away. The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

The philosopher will ask himself if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.

I discover vision, not as a ‘thinking about seeing,’ to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another’s gaze.

Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it’s caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.

The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

We know not through our intellect but through our experience.

Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

Language creates reality. Words have power. Speak always to create joy.

Reserve the language of sculpture for the art of sculpture. Lest you confuse beauty with the shape of a jaw or art with the size of a stomach.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language – always the language – was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

I’m often mistaken for Spanish or Latin descent.

Mama had an appreciation of the language. She taught me a love of words, of how they should be used and how they can fill a creative soul with a passion and lead to a life’s work.

Filthy language is used by people who don’t have the maturity or intelligence to express themselves with better words.

Yankees don’t understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.