John Freeman > Quotes

“True storytellers write not because they can but because they have to. There is something they want to say about the world that can only be said in a story.”
― John Freeman, How to Read a Novelist

“I had never heard of the little Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. And yet, that's where it all began. With an ordinary incident, one that happens frequently, but so frequently that it finally started something unstoppable.”
― John Freeman, Granta 116: Ten Years Later

“I realized that I was not only accumulating vocabulary in this new language, but also creating my own grammar.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I learned the words from cognates and also from their context.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“In June, I thought skiftet meant “funeral.” But in November, I decided it meant something like “will,” though by the end of the book I still wasn’t sure what it meant, because there were contexts in which both “funeral” and “will” made sense, but others in which neither of them did.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“now the word trodde is gathering associations that it wouldn’t have if I had learned it off a list of vocabulary to be memorized.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“As in English, one word can have several meanings, and one phrase can have several meanings. But whereas I take this for granted in English and am completely used to it, it surprises and frustrates me when I am trying to learn a new language.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“There was, to begin with, my original acquisition of my native language,”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I had bought the CD because I wanted to know more about how Norwegian sounded.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“my method of figuring out the words: contexts”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“The homeliest thought: I see, as I do this, how doing a little each day, if it is done regularly, adds up to a lot.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“this experiment is far less “pure” than the experience in the Graz classroom, which was in turn less pure than my original acquisition of English.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“It is far more satisfying to have one’s own urgent question answered by learning a point of grammar than to have to memorize that point of grammar before you actively want to know it, as in conventional language instruction.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I’m thinking about words all the time as I continue this project. Words on their own. Words in sentences. The histories and changing meanings of words.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“spelemann is probably “play-man,” if I choose to trust the German cognate spiel, meaning “play,” and therefore could be a gambler, actor, or musician. But the context here decides it: this spelemann is in demand at weddings—so he isn’t likely to be an actor or a gambler, and must be a musician.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“saw that finding the unknown word in another context might give me the answer.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“The first reading of a word or sentence might reveal nothing at all, and leave me mystified. But with just the small increase in familiarity that came from reading it a second time, the words would begin to suggest themselves. I wondered what happened in the brain between the first and the second reading.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“One of Solstad’s regular “connecting” statements in his narrative is: “Vi skal komme tilbakke til . . . ”—“We shall come to-back to . . .”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I had first suspected this reading the Mikke Mus comic, when, among the vivid words for sounds that sprawled in fat letters across the frames, I encountered splæsj (splash) and krasj (crash), along with others: splooosj, svooosj, flasj (cameras popping), svisj (pursued and pursuers racing past), and the sound of a sneeze—atsjoo—from a character concealed among some burlap sacks of soap powder.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“Last names became fixed in at least one family line, Solstad says, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Why then? Why not before, and why not after?”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I am still trying to figure out whether a beginner in a language understands a surprising amount, considering she knew so little a year ago, or whether she understands vastly little. Or maybe, contradictorily, the answer must be: both.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“For most of the book—324 pages—I had trouble with i tillegg til. Then at last (why after so long?) I understood it: “in addition to.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“Someone had suggested that another good way to start a foreign language was to read comic books.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I have a feeling its root has something to do with solving, but that may just be because I am so occupied with trying to solve the problem of this word.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“But it wasn’t possible, of course, that his characters kept poisoning themselves and then having children.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“I tended to keep mixing up pairs of words that looked somewhat alike, such as, at first, også and altså, later enda and ennå, våre and være, enke and ekte, vist and visst, skjedde and skjebne, jul (Christmas) and juli (July), nettopp and neppe, and må, mål, måle, mat, måte, måten, måtte. To a Norwegian, these words are miles apart in meaning, perhaps, and it’s laughable to mix them up. But I mix them up because, after all, the first thing you encounter, looking at a page of unfamiliar language, is not the meaning but the appearance of the words, the way they look.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“About the question of whether it is a novel, he said that the project itself seemed like an interesting challenge: how to narrate factually and yet get “the lift of fiction.” After he said this, I thought about the word “lift,” since it seemed he was pointing out something that fiction might give and that nonfiction might not give.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“Although I knew long ago, before I began this, that in Norwegian and other Scandinavian languages the definite article (the) is usually tacked onto the end of the noun, it is still one of the hardest things for me to grasp “instinctively” or automatically.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“It is satisfying to us, the readers, after having witnessed so many of his ancestors from afar, in little fragments, to be in the presence of a flesh-and-blood forebear of his.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival

“As I read along, I had to keep reminding myself, and saying “the” aloud in my head where it didn’t seem to appear with the word.”
― John Freeman, Freeman's: Arrival