Private and Public Language

" 'To kill time,' an English phrase that still chills me: time can be killed but only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities. No one thinks of suicide as a courageous endeavor to kill time."

"English is my private language. Every word has to be pondered before it becomes a word. I have no doubt—can this be an illusion?—that the conversation I have with myself, however linguistically flawed, is the conversation that I have always wanted, in the exact way I want it to be."

"There’s so much to give up: hope, freedom, dignity. A private language, however, defies any confinement. Death alone can take it away."

"Often I think that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living. Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language. That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections."

--"To Speak is to Blunder," by Li, The New Yorker