“I went back to look for you.Not understanding the language of hello,I thought I’d speak it just the same.”
“I’d thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she’d surpassed all the language I had for it.”
“Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.”
“I do not belong to a nation because I speak the same language as they do; I belong to them because I feel the same pain as they did.”
“I went into physics to hang around with the bright kids. I wasn’t doing anything else and I didn’t want to look dumb, so I thought I’d pretend to be a physicist, just like the others. It was five or ten years after my Ph.D. before I realized I was pretty good.”
“Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it? ‘I am the carpenter….”