“Words were so much more alive and more difficult to handle, now; so much so that Kit did not seem to understand them when he used them. They slipped into his head like the wind blowing into a room, and extinguished the frail flame of an idea forming there in the dark. Less and less he used them in his thinking. The process became more mobile; he followed the course of thoughts because he was tied on behind. […] It was an existence of exile from the world.”
Paul Bowles in The Sheltering Sky, quoted at fuller length by E.C. Mendenhall, who continued with fascinating commentary on the idea that to live abroad is to speak “with imprecision [and] to attach a margin of error to every idea one wishes to express.”
