"'are there dragons?' she asked. i said that there were not. 'have there ever been?' i said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'but if there's a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.'

precisely. the power of language. preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight."

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"we open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. we are walking lexicons. in a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve latin, anglo-saxon, norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. more than that, we speak volumes -- our language is the language of everything we have not read... i never cease to wonder at it. that words are more durable than anything, they blow with the wind, hibernate, and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive."
-penelope lively, moon tiger-