If the components of the body were organs and veins and cells, then the components of thought and language were words and grammar.

Nothing seems more beautiful to me than language when it creats the impression of order.

This is why the past seems perfect, a time of proportion and order, because it is immersed in speech. For animals, memory might reside as a sensation, a resonance in the nerves, or in the meat of the spine. But for humans, the past cannot be described except in words. It is nowhere else.

The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.

This is the nature of social existence. We talk in order to impose limits, to contain the world in a narrow frame.

Betrug und Schönheit der Sprache bestehen darin, dass sie das ganze Universum zu ordnen scheint und uns zu der Annahme verführt, wir lebten in Anbetracht eines rationalen Raumes, einer möglichen Harmonie. Doch da Wörter uns von der Gegenwart distanzieren, weshalb wir niemals ganz der Realität der Dinge habhaft werden, machen sie die Vergangenheit zur absoluten Fiktion.