Language disguises thought.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein Linguistics Logic Philosophy Semiotics

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used to tell at all.

~ Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Lies Semiotics Truth

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides Books Literary Criticism Literary Theory Narrative Nineteenth Century Novels Plot Postmodernism Reading Semiotics Victorians

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

~ Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny Buddhism History Humanity Memory Narrative Reality Semiotics Story Truthful Words

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

~ Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley Communication Constraints Experience Human Information Language Mind Semantics Semiotics Symbols

In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, ‘she’ is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of ‘woman’. The ancient, dimorphic form ‘he’, once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of ‘she’, during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to.

~ Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany Feminism Gender Queer Semiotics

In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.

~ Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes City Center Imagination Japan Semiotics Signs Tokyo

I still notice the burned house, mornings, when I walk along the beach. Well, obviously I do not notice the house. What I notice is what remains of the house. One is still prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not remarkably much left of it.

~ David Markson

David Markson Language Memory Semiotics

One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words

~ William Saroyan

William Saroyan Images Language Semiotics

I have a disease, I see language.

~ Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes Autobiography Language Semiotics Writing