Alena's Quotes

#1. swallowed by another noise: an indistinct thudder.

Alena Graedon

#2. Sometimes the best way out of darkness is into it.

Alena Graedon

#3. When Vern had described Meme users so estranged from everyday language that they didn't know what words they didn't know, I

Alena Graedon

#4. It lets us hear the clanging air of history and slips the links of our own epoch onto that long concatenation.

Alena Graedon

#5. the 19th century saw the rise of what we came to call linear thought, a way of processing the world that was made possible only by the medium of books.

Alena Graedon

#6. Creation is collaboration," as

Alena Graedon

#7. In truth, it was also by design: as much as I loved my mother, she wasn't often the person I sought for comfort in hard times. She disapproved tacitly of crying.

Alena Graedon

#8. I think this had to do with the vintage of his family's money: the older the gold, the less shiny it tends to be.

Alena Graedon

#9. But maybe because I'm from a part of the country where there are more meth labs than drive-throughs, anything harder than cough syrup always makes me nervous.

Alena Graedon

#10. Must every action - every word and thought - recall Alena? Swimming, currents, beaches, exhibitions, artists, parties. How long until my bodily presence had half the substance her absence did?

Rachel Pastan

#11. promised him, of course, that I wouldn't say anything, which I wouldn't have anyway, because of the sheer unpleasantry of divulging an unattractive truth to an attractive person.)

Alena Graedon

#12. Language is infinite. It can be as creative, and as chillingly precise, as the human mind.

Alena Graedon

#13. Definition, like poetry, is the project of revivifying the familiar. Making things we think we know seem newly strange. To estrange, according to Hegel, is requisite to practicing consciousness.

Alena Graedon

#14. Reflection can be its own reward.

Alena Graedon

#15. Language comes from what we've seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what's not.

Alena Graedon

#16. It's always the scuffs in the marble that make its inner light seem to glow more brightly.

Alena Graedon

#17. We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you're an ass.

Alena Graedon

#18. But as Hegel teaches us, beginnings are necessarily problematic. (As are endings.) How can I describe my first encounter with Ana fairly, when my understanding of her essence has passed through infinite iterations over the past four and a half years? My

Alena Graedon

#19. shook my head and smiled. He smiled back. Our smiles said vastly different things.

Alena Graedon

#20. When I made some observation about linguistic affinity and heredity and Freud - so obvious, I worried that I sounded like a philistine - Ana gave a startled, gargled laugh. Her already enormous eyes grew even wider. And I was immediately engulfed in a warm, prickly compunction.

Alena Graedon

#21. Words, then, are born of worlds. But they also take us places we can't go: Constantinople and Mars, Valhalla, the Planet of the Apes. Language comes from what we've seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what's not. The Word, after all, is God.

Alena Graedon

#22. People become so obsessed with the future, they make it up.

Alena Graedon

#23. Consciousness is a process of constant alienation. The mind, through reflection, confronting itself.

Alena Graedon

#24. Language also acts like love in form.

Alena Graedon

#25. Words are living legends, swollen with significance. We string them together to make stories, but they themselves ARE stories, encapsulating rich, runny histories.

Alena Graedon

#26. In the words of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds.

Alena Graedon

#27. In Japanese, koi no yokan means the ineluctable feeling you have, upon meeting someone for the first time, that eventually the two of you will fall in love.

Alena Graedon

#28. Apparently I'm not the only one - we've been hearing that some consumers actually started lining up outside stores days ago in anticipation of the new Nautilus. A few analysts are projecting more than seven or eight million sales in the first week alone.

Alena Graedon

#29. but I could feel the jealous eyes of the steexin hangers-on still in line, and I lament to report that it boosted my spirits some), he

Alena Graedon

#30. Our natural tendency is to be distracted - to scan the horizon constantly for predators and prospects. Books made us turn that attention inward, to build higher and higher castles within the quiet kingdoms of our minds. Through that process of reflection and deep thinking, we evolved.

Alena Graedon

#31. think the word you might be searching for," she finally said, "is stupefied. Or awed? Inspired?" She gave a shy little smile. "But vib. I'm not mad at you, Bartleby." My heart felt like a rubber ball bouncing down the stairs.

Alena Graedon

#32. Words, I've come to learn, are pulleys through time. Portals into other minds. Without words, what remains? Indecipherable customs. Strange rites. Blighted hearts. Without words, we're history's orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased

Alena Graedon

#33. Yes. Well, as I said, love can haunt us, and make us do strange things.

Alena Graedon