Sidewalk sign, outside an insurance firm: 'Let us quote you!'

Or a computer programmer, using it as a verb.

You shouldn't need to say 'unquote', ever, unless you're an editor or talking to one.

I hate it when people try to read quote marks aloud.

'Let us consider the praying mantis, a formidable, voracious insect. These creatures have a nature fascinating to many people. Mating is part of their self-realization, but some males are eaten when performing the act of copulation. Is he happy; is he having pleasure? We don't know. Well done if he does!'

'I asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts, —no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time!'

Hollering and children go together.

If you don't holler much you will learn to when you have kids.

Charitably, one might think of a speaker's attachment to his script, to the paper resting on the podium, in terms of a wish to let him put forth only his best thoughts.

But one might also think about unscripted conversation, real talking, in terms of our wish to hear his best thoughts, and not the best thoughts that someone or other came up with before appearing before us in the guise of the author of a paper.

It is interesting to think about academic papers in light of these categories of 'what was thought', of subjectivated discourse, of thoughts made not just one's own but made into oneself so as to be always at hand. Personally, I don't know that I've ever written anything—certainly not anything long—to which I would not rather be able to refer to from time to time in order to refresh my memory as to what exactly it is I'm saying, or thinking. Or: what exactly it is I said, or thought. There is little about my work so far that has not depended on complex or lengthy formulations, on the extended schematism of section-and-subsection, on particular expressions and choices of words which I can't always replicate in conversation. You can see the same sort of thing on display, regularly, when philosophers give talks or present at conferences. Their papers act as scripts, and they cling to them out of rigidity, or anxiety, or because seeking a kind of competitive advantage in performance. Debates, responses to criticism, can easily come to be miniature tangles of exegetical dispute. 'What I said was…', one retorts, citing one's own written words in order to reject a misreading of them. (Imagine two friends or two lovers having an argument this way! 'My position, as already stated in my initial document, was…'.) Or as a discussion unfolds in the wake of a paper's being read out, savvy observers will be able to notice when an author, in coming to really inhabit the role of speaker and take part in a conversation, has divorced himself from the literal author of the words written. With this kind of thing one hears reference to 'what the speaker really wants to say', and to his not knowing what exactly he thinks, because he is unable to consistently maintain one thing said and one explanation or justification for it, against the fixed standard of his own writing. Here the role of the writing in the larger scholarly or academic practice is a kind of progressive approximation to words that an author would never have to take back or amend or adjust. Or would not, for the most part, have to: so you hear authors say that they are still more or less satisfied with something they have written. Or that they don't think a criticism or a probing question has done so much as to make them give up, in the main, what they have written—which they suggest that perhaps you should reread. For me one of the most distasteful uses of writing is when it is cited in a kind of deflection of conversation. 'I already wrote about that. If you want to know what I think, just go read it.' In other words: I'm not going to go over that again; it's not worth my time to talk to you. Here are thoughts about which one could wonder: were they ever really made into oneself, made not just a part of the author but incorporated into the author's life? It seems as if, at best, a thinker's writings are adjunct to his life. Annexes. Storage sheds. To make this into an institutional fact would be to deny that thought could or need ever play a more personal role.