Jon Gauthier

“The telegram "GRANDMOTHER DEAD FUNERAL WEDNESDAY" can be translated into any language you like—from Latin and Hindustani to the dialects of the Apaches, Eskimos, or the tribe of Dobu. We could even do this, no doubt, with the language of the Mousterian period, if we knew it. The reason is that everyone h as a mother, who has a mother; that everyone must die; that the ritualization of the disposing of a corpse is a cultural constant; as is, also, the principle of reckoning time. But beings that are unisexual would not know the distinction between mother and father, and those that divide like amoebas would be unable to form the idea even of a unisexual parent. The meanings of "grandmother" thus could not be conveyed. Beings that do not die (amoebas, dividing, do not die) would be unacquainted with the notion of death and of funerals. They would therefore have to learn about human anatomy, physiology, evolution, history, and customs before they could begin the translation of this telegram that is so clear to us.”
― Stanisław Lem

“Nada alimenta el olvido como una guerra, Daniel. Todos callamos y se esfuerzan en convencernos de lo que hemos visto, lo que hemos hecho, lo que hemos aprendido de nosotros mismos y de los demás, es una ilusión, una pesadilla pasajera. Las guerras no tienen memoria y nadie se atreve a comprenderlas hasta que ya no quedan voces para contar lo que pasó, hasta que llega el momento en que no se las reconoce y regresan, con otra cara y otro nombre, a devorar lo que dejaron atrás.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language