Sublime

Some commentators point out that conservatives vote against their economic interests. What they miss is that those conservatives are voting their moral interests, and they will continue to do so. Therefore liberals need to understand the difference between policy and morality and that morality beats policy.

Language is replete with a variety of “things” that have no existence in time and space but seem as real to us as anything we own—“justice,” for instance, or “aesthetics,” or “zero.” Using these concepts, we can accomplish what we could not otherwise. They are tools that allow us to count, to learn from others, to establish guidelines for behavior.

Everything that is spoken and can be spoken is merely a figurative term we use to nominate the unnamable, an inventory of “metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” that we have mistaken for the real and fixed. All we have is language and we cannot get beyond it.

“Language doesn’t just make things—it assembles, cobbles together, entire worlds and all the relations within.”

In learning to drive, walk, see or talk, in our very being, we are a massive interpenetrating collection of paths and routines worn by repetition; we are each a landscape, shaped by recurring patterns of force and formed by desire.

we can certainly affect the language, and those of us who use it professionally are responsible for looking after it.

language is about performance as much as about propositions having to do with reality.

the global, intuitional language of fantasy to describe, as accurately as they can, the way “we” live “now.”