To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms.

Grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language

Literature is an extraordinary technology for the transmission of consciousness

Language is fossil poetry, Emerson says

Ms. Lemercier (a hugely popular French comedian)