carina

“Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses. The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience. The same holds true for all other achievements of man; ideas, art, any kind of man-made objects. They are man's creations; they are valuable aids for life, yet each one of them is also a trap, a temptation to confuse life with things, experience with artifacts, feeling with surrender and submission.”
― Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man

“It was my mother who bought me green ink for the first time, along with the fountain pen she gave me as a gift to mark my graduation from high school.
When I asked ‘Why green?’ she laughed and shrugged. ‘I don’t know, maybe just because it’s different from black and blue.’
My father smirked. ’It’s different from black and blue!’ Madam insists that all of her things be different from those of other people.’
My mother looked at him for a few moments and then turned to me. Nowadays she had to look up at me to meet my eyes, and I had to lean down to kiss her. She said, ‘Write something, see if you like it.’
On the corner of the Alik newspaper that was delivered to our house in the afternoon for my father, I wrote, ‘Green ink is different from all other inks. I like people and things that are different.”
― Zoya Pirzad, Space Between Us

“Try not to live in a linguistic slum.”
― Susan Sontag

“We may know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellowman, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellowman is not a thing. The further we reach into the depths of our being, on someone else's being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving