Casey Miller (Casey Geddes Miller) Quotes
Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed.
Quotes to Explore
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At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.
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If you love things or ideas or people that contradict each other, you have to be prepared to fight for every square inch of intellectual real estate you occupy.
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Yiddish, originally, in Eastern Europe was considered the language of children, of the illiterate, of women. And 500 years later, by the 19th century, by the 18th century, writers realized that, in order to communicate with the masses, they could no longer write in Hebrew. They needed to write in Yiddish, the language of the population.
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I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.
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My office in Milan is in an old factory. I have all my companies here, including Italia Independent and Independent Ideas.
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Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.
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I think pop music is a great place to get new ideas across.
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The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.
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Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
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The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.
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The huge difference in my lifetime is that you can just go up to somebody and make a pass. You couldn't do that in the 1950s if you were gay. There were secret handshakes, a secret language. There was nowhere you could go to be romantic outside of people's houses.
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You used to be able to just call people. You didn't have to be on someone's calendar to have a phone conversation. The telephone was an important and valuable domain of communication, both for casual, friendly chats and for professional exchanges of ideas and information. But no more.
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When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
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No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
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I've never been a fan of directors who clutter a piece with all sorts of crazy preconceptions or weird ideas.
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I carry a small spiral notebook with me at all times and have been doing this for many years. There's a shoe box in my closet filled with these notebooks, each riddled with notes and impressions, ideas, schemes, and soup recipes.
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The Swedish language combines the strong manhood of the German with the delicate beauty of the Italian.
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If I didn't have children I might be more of a lush than I am. I like booze. I struggle with smoking. And I'm a big swearer. I'm trying to rein it in but I do think it's a nice seasoning of language.
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Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.
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Love is a choice. Total forgiveness is a choice. It is not a feeling-at least at first-but is rather an act of the will. It is the choice to tear up the record of wrongs we have been keeping.
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One cannot have "success" in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer.
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Governments have a favorite phrase: 'lean and mean.' But they've been made very, very fat for corporate interests.
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We have recorded songs on the same day that were released years later in other albums.
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Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed.
