Rod Liberal

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Maybe, but such cycles are not just a Gallic idiosyncracy. Take an English phrase like ‘up above’, and you’ll discover a no less hyperbolic history. Old English ufan meant ‘on up’ – it was the locative case of the preposition uf ‘up’. But this little ufan was not considered nearly sturdy enough, so it was reinforced by another preposition, be ‘by’, to give a beefier be-ufan ‘by on up’. But before long, be-ufan was assaulted by the forces of erosion, and ended up as a mere bufan. Naturally, the syllabically-challenged bufan had to be pumped up again, this time by the preposition an ‘on’, to give an-bufan ‘on by on up’. Later on, anbufan was ground down by erosion, and – to cut a long story short – ended up as the modest above. But it seems that a mere above doesn’t soar nearly high enough nowadays, so we sometimes feel the need to reinforce it with ‘up’, to give up above – literally ‘up on by on up’.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“For just like the rainforests and the coral reefs, the languages of the world are vanishing. At an estimated death-rate of one language every two weeks, it seems that before this century is out, between half and three-quarters of the world’s six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, and among them almost all the languages of small preliterate societies.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention