He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories.

When observation fails to align with a truth, what do you trust--your senses or your truth? The Greeks didn't even have a word for blue. The color didn't exist to them. Couldn't see it without a word for it.I think about her all the time. My stomach flips when I see her. But is it love, or just something we don't have a word for?

And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracise and minimise. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with.