“Every word is an abstraction or category, not a particular.”

— Robert Pinsky

The Situation of Poetry - Contemporary Poetry and its Traditions Princeton University Press 1976
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Robert Pinsky 21

American poet, editor, literary critic, academic. 1940

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“Is there anything we cannot contrive to call the demands of the times, and is there anything that does not acquire a certain prestige by being the demand of the times? But for decisive religious categories to become the demand for the times is eo ipso a contradiction. “The times” is too abstract a category to be able as claimant to demand the decisive religious categories that belong specifically to individuality and particularity; loud collective demands en mass for what can be shared only by the single individual in particularity, in solitariness, in silence, cannot be made.”

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“On voice and music: "The voice, for me, is probably the best instrument, but, on the other hand, when a person sings words they immediately limit themselves to a certain category of people, to a particular dialect.”

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“The abstract categories of imperialism are neither exempt from the need of a foundation, nor will the fact that they are coextensive with ordinary discourse provide them with the needed foundation.”

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“Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.”

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“Abstract terms (however useful they may be in argument) should be discarded in meditation, and the mind should be fixed on the particular and the concrete, that is, on the things themselves.”

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Paragraph 4.
De Motu (1721)

“What can be called "consciousness of the process of abstraction." That is, consciousness of the fact that out of a virtually infinite universe of possible things to pay attention to, we abstract only certain portions, and those portions turn out to be the ones for which we have verbal labels and categories. What we abstract, i. e., "see," and how we abstract it, or see it, or see it or think about it, is for all practical purposes inseparable from how we talk about it.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

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“Every word is an abstraction or category, not a particular.”

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