“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Do you have more details about the quote "I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starl…" by Shirley Jackson?
Shirley Jackson photo
Shirley Jackson 49
novelist, short story writer 1916–1965

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: If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
Randy Allen Harris, in Rhetoric and Incommensurability (2005), p. 35, and an endnote on p. 138 indicates the misattribution seems to have originated in a misreading of quotes in Patterns Of Discovery: An Inquiry Into The Conceptual Foundations of Science (1958) by Norwood Russell Hanson, where an actual quotation of WIttgenstein on p. 184 is followed by one from the book on psychology.
Misattributed

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“I have spoke with the tongue of Angels,I have held the hand of The Devil.It was warm in the night,I was cold as a stone”

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