I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.