Penelope Lively
British novelist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.
—Penelope Lively, British novelist, Moon Tiger, 1987
Posted on November 30, 1999 at 7:02 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes — our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
—Penelope Lively, British novelist, Moon Tiger, 1987
Posted on June 2, 2000 at 9:36 PM
|
