“In the silence
that is his chosen medium
of communication and telling
others about it
in words. Is there no way
not to be the sport
of reason?”

[Hodgson, William, The House on the Borderland, Vertigo / DC Comics, 2000, 978-1-56389-545-6]</ref>}}

posthumous
Source: 'Edward Hopper', Goodrich; p. 152; as quoted in "Edward Hopper", Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 52

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Source: Sun and Steel (1968), p. 9.
Context: Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to excessive stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.
Many people will express disbelief that such a process could already be at work in a person's earliest years. But that, beyond doubt, is what happened to me personally, thereby laying the ground for two contradictory tendencies within myself. One was the determination to press ahead loyally with the corrosive function of words, and to make that my life's work. The other was the desire to encounter reality in some field where words should play no part at all.

The Unnamable (1954)

Source: Baseball And Billions - Updated edition - (1992), Chapter 8, The Future, p. 186.

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 235
Context: It may be asked, if He, as appears, has chosen to employ inferior organisms as a generative medium for the production of higher ones, even including ourselves, what right have we, his humble creatures, to find fault? There is, also, in this prejudice, an element of unkindliness towards the lower animals, which is utterly out of place. These creatures are all of them part products of the Almighty Conception, as well as ourselves.... Let us regard them in a proper spirit, as parts of the grand plan, instead of contemplating them in the light of frivolous prejudices, and we shall be altogether at a loss to see how there should be any degradation in the idea of our race having been genealogically connected with them.

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: Lightning hits!
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric.

Enchantment (1999)