“Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.”

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns.

Journal entry (14 May 1915), p. 48
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916

Rolling Stone (1990)

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. III (p. 104).

Source: Books, The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 11

Statement in Mexico (1958); as quoted in Kaplan AP World History 2005 (2004) edited by the Kaplan staff, p. 240

Source: Brisingr

“Five Thousand Years Later” (p. 741)
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

On the Educational Value of the Medical Society (1903), p. 333