Mark Alexander

“People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“It's not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only a relationship, but this special relationship between two things of different kinds....In sum, all the seemingly complicated kinds of modification in English are just ways of thinking and seeing how things go with each other or reflect each other. Modifiers in our language are not aids to understanding relationships; they are the ways to understand relationships. A mistake in this matter either comes from or causes a clouded mind. Usually it's both.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“Only in some very special cases is comprehension the point of reading--in things like recipes and "reading material." The point of reading is understanding, and comprehension is to understanding as getting wet is to swimming. You must do the one before you can hope to do the other, but you don't do the other simply because you do the one.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Leaning Tower of Babel and Other Affronts by the Underground Grammarian

“His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say