“Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture.”

Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.

In front of a US Senate Committee—and later in his book, The Brainwashing Machine—Ruff detailed the horrific treatment he had received at the hands of the secret police. After the usual attempts at heavy-handed interrogation (as an opener, he was asked to confess; when he refused, his interrogator smashed him in the face with a cast-iron ashtray, knocking out two teeth), Ruff was led to the room where, he was told, Mindszenty had been ‘broken’. A doctor took him aside and warned him that in the ‘Magic Room’ he would either confess or end up schizophrenic. The room itself, and everything in it, was irregularly shaped to eliminate right angles and create visual disorientation. The door was oval. Inside, lights rotated constantly and moving images were projected on to the walls. Furniture was translucent and the bed sloped at an angle to make sleep impossible. Strange sounds were played through hidden speakers, so that Ruff might go to sleep listening to music but wake to the screams of women being tortured. Mealtimes were varied: he was sometimes served meals twice, five minutes apart, to confuse him. Repeatedly drugged, he would go to sleep naked but wake up dressed, or vice versa.

As historians have shown, there is no evidence that pure barter economies ever existed, anywhere; instead, the historical record is rich with human societies in which credit came first, deeply intertwined within moral and cultural systems, with money and markets developing only later, via the state. Capitalism benefits from the fiction that free trade is natural and that there are neat divisions between different spheres of behavior, most importantly the marketplace. “The economy” is to be left to its own devices, to be navigated by individuals, to be studied mathematically by economists, to be tinkered with only on the edges by technocrats.

“If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn’t do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.”

“Language is my home. It is alive other than in speech. It is beyond a thing to be carried with me. It is ineluctable, variegated and muscular. A flicker and drag emanates from the idea of it. Language seems capable of girding the oceanic earth, like the world-serpent of Norse legend. It is as if language places a shaping pressure upon our territories of habitation and voyage; thrashing, independent, threatening to rive our known world apart."

“A point, a line, alignment. Lovely the lingering lights along the shore as the century lays itself out for observation: hunger and the youthful indiscretion. I am one of many, or not even one, but am of many one who watches the waves and allows the particulate sand its say, say, its sound, susurrant. Of many one engaging the ear as if the Pacific meant its name, as if the edge of continent contented us with boundary. Draw a line from A to B. Live there.”

“Things that rain, and things that grow. They are all that hold my interest. (Until the things that rain have grown, and the things that grow have poured.) Things that rain, and things that grow. They are all that I desire. (Until the things that grow cease to grow, and the things that rain no longer rain a single drop.)”