
“It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it.”
"Outside The Whale" in Granta (1984) http://web.archive.org/web/20110618004653/http://www.granta.com/Magazine/11/Outside-the-Whale/Page-2
Source: Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self
“It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it.”
"Outside The Whale" in Granta (1984) http://web.archive.org/web/20110618004653/http://www.granta.com/Magazine/11/Outside-the-Whale/Page-2
“What in God’s name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?”
continuity (42) “And Say Which Seed Will Grow“
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award from In Defense of Animals in 1992.
Unsourced variant or paraphrase: … We might have given it any name we wished: Abyss, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence. But never forget, it is we who give it a name.
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: We have seen the highest circle of spiraling powers. We have named this circle God. We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence.
But we have named it God because only this name, for primordial reasons, can stir our hearts profoundly. And this deeply felt emotion is indispensable if we are to touch, body with body, the dread essence beyond logic.
Within this gigantic circle of divinity we are in duty bound to separate and perceive clearly the small, burning arc of our epoch.
Speech at the Prussian Academy of Art in Berlin (22 January 1929); also in Essays of Three Decades (1942)