Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

I was partly old-fashioned and partly modern.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

It was there I met my future wife, Celeste Landry, although our lives took us separate ways for many years and we were not to marry until more than ten years later.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

Six months after that, I left Taiwan, first for Hong Kong and then for mainland China, where I spent another three months studying still more Chinese and generally kicking around the country.

As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961.

Conversely, I came to realize that being good at something is hardly a reason to avoid doing it.

Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.

My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits.

My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.

With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

The postdoc explained to me how to distinguish different sorts of particles on the basis of the amounts of energy they deposited in various sorts of detectors, spark chambers, calorimeters, what have you.

The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture.

I certainly remember building model rockets. It was fun to watch the rocket blast into the air, suspenseful to wonder if the parachute would open to bring the rocket safely back.

Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Music is the soul of language.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

There are infinite shadings of light and shadows and colors... it's an extraordinarily subtle language. Figuring out how to speak that language is a lifetime job.

Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.

I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way.

Two races share today the soil of Canada. These people had not always been friends. But I hasten to say it. There is no longer any family here but the human family. It matters not the language people speak, or the altars at which they kneel.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

They are damn good projects - excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there - God damn it!

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.