“But even in the schoolyard I'd been aware of that silence, that reserve in him, as though he'd been raised by foxes and language was his second language.”

“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into whichhe has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records ofother people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness isthe only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts fordata, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is theuniverse of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.”

“his wartime experience had taught him to trust his instincts, even though he'd never been sure where they'd come from.”

“We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.”

“Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.”

“He would be a consul no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was ignorant; though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might have been a consul at home.”