That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.
Interpretation
Language transcends physical boundaries, allowing for both internal and external communication, often unnoticed.
Siri Hustvedt's quote reflects on the complexity of language as a medium that connects our inner thoughts and feelings with the outside world. It highlights the remarkable ability of language to navigate and bridge the divide between our personal experiences and shared meanings, often without our conscious awareness of this transition.
In practice
In a discussion about the power of storytelling in literature.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.
Our minds possess by nature an insatiable desire to know the truth.
The analysis of concepts is for the understanding nothing more than what the magnifying glass is for sight
It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
O, call back yesterday, bid time return
There are such beings as vampires, some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples.
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