“Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences.”

“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”

“All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.”

“A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.”

“Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.”

“The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.- Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993”