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.
The only proof for the existence of God is that without God you couldn't prove anything.
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world.
My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It's their work that I'm supporting. So it's not me doing it. But I can empower them. I can support them, and I can help them.
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
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