“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.”

“The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.”

“We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.”

“We cannot say what they meant, for there are no words for their meaning, but we know it without words and we knew it then.”

“We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration”

“In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do.”