“What happens to our thoughts as we clothe them in language, and how faithfully are they preserved when our listeners undress them?”

“We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.”

“The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others.”

“I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.”

“Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?”

“Our stories are what we have,” Our Good Mother says. “Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?”