From Making History, by K.J. Parker:
People are like that with their language. They knock it about, abuse it, miss out consonants, elide great chunks out of verbs, use words for jobs they aren’t suitable for, like someone knocking in a nail with the butt of a screwdriver. Word endings get ground down and smoothed away. Definite articles break off and get lost in the cracks between the floorboards. Verbs become irregular, like trees grow up through each other. Careless, slovenly people like you and me who know what we mean come to the conclusion that they don’t need no stinking pluperfect subjective and use the aorist instead. The neuter gender goes out of fashion, like broad-brimmed hats. Inflexions wither away and people rely on word order instead. By the time a society is old enough to live in towns and cities, fight wars and pay taxes, their language looks like a hand-me-down shirt, all patches and taken-in seams and a bit of string for laces instead of seven neatly matching buttons.
From Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett (recently quoted by Rhianna Pratchett in a thread about her father’s trans allyship):
Words in the heart cannot be taken.
From “Obscure and Ill-Fated,” by Rachel Kushner for The New York Review of Books:
We needed literature that included both the particulars and the broader view—literature that eschewed moral simplicity in asking who does bad and why, and that tarried with the component of luck, in life as in books, in shaping outcomes.
From A Mouthful of Dust, by Nghi Vo:
The clerics of the Singing Hills, however, were stranger than most, with their deep archives and the long memory of their neixin companions. They recorded and they remembered, and it made them few friends among people in power.
