"I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies."
"A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences."
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Source: Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993
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"If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down."
"The function of freedom is to free someone else."
"Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love."
"There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism."
"There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."