simran

“Sometimes words were useless. No matter how they called out to him, Araki and Mrs. Matsumoto had been unable to tether the professor’s life to this earth. And yet the professor wasn’t completely gone, either. Because of words, the most important part of him was lodged in their hearts.”
― Shion Miura, The Great Passage

“The biggest Japanese dictionary of all time was the Great Dictionary of Japanese. Twenty-four years after its first publication, a second edition had come out, increasing the number of entry words from 450,000 to half a million—testimony to the editors’ and contributors’ determination to respond to changes in a living language by ceaselessly collecting words and nurturing the growth of the dictionary.”
― Shion Miura, The Great Passage

“Maybe there’s no way around it, but I don’t think either men or women appreciate being defined in terms of pregnancy. There are such people as hermaphrodites, and I just think there should be a little more leeway in the definition. Something like, ‘The gender that is not male. Also, those who so identify themselves.”
― Shion Miura, The Great Passage

“they see a dictionary as a way to enhance national prestige. Language helps form a sense of national identity, and, to a certain degree, unification and control of language are necessary to bring a nation together.”
― Shion Miura, The Great Passage