Jessica

“He always finds himself face to face with the incomprehensible, inaccessible, the "language of the stone". And his only recourse is talking. This cannot be "literature". Literature belongs to those who are at home in the world. He can only talk in a simple--deceptively simple--way: circular, repetitive, insisting on the very gap between him and the world, between him and nature. He can only hope that out of his insistence will come a new language which can fill the gap and include the other side.”
― Rosemarie Waldrop, Collected Prose

“The history of empires is the history of human misery.”
― Edward Gibbon

“One senses that Hegel was possible only in German, and finds it natural that Locke in a language where large and red precede apple should have arrived at the thing after sorting out its sensory qualities, whereas Descartes in a language where grosse et rouge follows pomme should have come to the attributes after the distinct idea.”
― Hugh Kenner

“There's a proverb, a maxim, that runs, 'The dead man is dead; let's give a hand to the living.' Now, you say that to a man from the North, and he visualizes the scene of an accident with one dead and one injured man; it's reasonable to let the dead man be and to set about saving the injured man. But a Sicilian visualizes a murdered man and his murderer, and the living man who's to be helped is the murderer.”
― Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own