Palimpsest Quotes

“Socrates is talking not about memory in general, nor especially the art of mnemonics practiced by masters of memory. In Socrates’s reckoning, she writes, the ancient Egyptians possessed memory of the deepest kind: memory of the Ideas—the living universal realities of which all things, passions, sensations, and sundry states of affairs are but passing shadows. Memory in this view is no apparatus for the collation and curation of trivia but the imperishable recollection of the knowledge we possessed before we are born—the foundation of knowledge itself. “A Platonic memory,” Yates concludes, “would have to be organised, not in the trivial manner of . . . mnemotechnics, but in relation to the realities.” Memory in the Platonic definition is not about storage but revelation.”
― Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word

“a language, he said, is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
― Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word

“explanation of the difference between a language and a dialect:”
― Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word

“The son of London laborers, Smith was an engraver who taught himself to read Assyrian cuneiform during lunch hours in the British Museum.”
― Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word

“Topologically, a P and a q are equivalent, as are a coffee mug and a doughnut.”
― Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word