“The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do.”

Source: The Solace of Open Spaces

Book I, Chapter 2, p. 51
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
Context: It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete metaphiers become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb 'to be' was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms 'am' and 'is' have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, “to breathe.” It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for 'existence' and could only say that something 'grows' or that it “breathes.”

"The Jelly-Bean"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Dune Genesis (1980)

Journals A 126 (March 1836)
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s
Context: One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states). How many people are just adjectives, interjections, conjunctions, adverbs? How few are substantives, active verbs, how many are copulas? Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.

Source: Cold Mountain

Frag. B 1, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.

Quotes from acting