julia

“Just as we would be inestimably poorer to be denied the opportunity to see giraffes, roses, bombardier beetles, tulips, and little black house cats with white spots on their chests that sit on our laps as we write, we lose one of the true wonders of the world every time one of these glorious variations on a theme set by the first language slips away unrecorded for posterity.”
― John McWhorter, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language ― A Witty Linguistics Book on How Thousands of Tongues Evolved from One Source

“The world's riffs on basic material that emerged in East Africa around 148,000 BC represent six thousand ways of being human”
― John McWhorter, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language ― A Witty Linguistics Book on How Thousands of Tongues Evolved from One Source

“Friendship is work, and a commitment, and a practice.”
― Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War