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1 " Now we were standing around holding hands and not much was going on. I began to think of words I had known, just for fun, to fill up the blank space in my head. Couch, I thought. Cuisinart, I thought.The words felt different right now than they had before. They meant a little less, held a little less, but seemed somehow fuller: I had never really noticed how much sound there was in a word. The way it filled your mouth up with emptiness, a sort of loosened emptiness that you could tongue, an emptiness you could suck on like a stone. Stomach, I thought. Variety, I thought. Expectation. Intimation. Infiltration. Infiltration: I tongued that one further. I knew it had a hostile aspect, like someone breaking into your house or posing as someone you should trust. But it also had a lovely sound, a kind of tapered point and a gently ruffled edge, and as I repeated it over and over in my mouth it took on a really great flavor and I thought of water filtering in and out of a piece of fabric, back and forth, moving between, soaking it and washing out, soaking in and taking with it pale tremors of color, memory, resistance, all that stuff, until I felt like one of those pieces of cloth on the television commercials that got washed with the name-brand cleanser and is now not only white, but silky and mountain-scented. "
― Alexandra Kleeman , Intimations: Stories
2 " And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled. "
― Catherine Lacey , Nobody Is Ever Missing
3 " What the dead had no speech for, when living,They can tell you, being dead: the communicationOf the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. "
― T.S. Eliot , Four Quartets
4 " Shelby looked over to see Andrew silently mouthing syllables to himself, as if he were part of an ecstatic rite. He grinned as he bit fricatives and tongued plosives. He was tasting English origins, mulling over words ripped from bronze-smelling hoards. Words that had slept beneath centuries of dust and small rain, sharp and bright as scale mail. Poetry had never moved her quite so much as drama. She loved the shock of colloquy, the beat and treble of words doing what they had to on stage. Andrew preferred the echo of poems buried alive. "
― , Pile of Bones (Parallel Parks, #1)
5 " The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. "
