treat each day as a word spoken to us, your(self—as an answer to the word —Anna Kamieńska

Late Victorian mountaineers, including a lady fully dressed and corseted,

cross a crevasse in the Alps, 1900 Decades of the 20th Century —Nick Yapp

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Consciousness is reflected in a word as a sun in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness.


—Lev Vygotsky

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Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling.

Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately. If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart. 

An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love. 

Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling. 


—Robert Johnson
The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden

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We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. 

But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are. 


—Anthony Marra
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt Thought and Language, 2012, p.271

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so

  

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So a little spring prays to the ocean, so the beating heart prays to the heart of the universe, so the little word prays to the great Logos, so a dust speck prays to the earth, so the earth prays to the cosmos, so the one prays to the billion, so human love prays to God’s love, so always prays to never, so the moment prays to eternity, so the snowflake prays to winter, so the frightened beast prays to the forest silence, so uncertainty prays to beauty itself.

And all these prayers are heard.


—Anna Kamieńska
In the Great River: A Notebook

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