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Speaking

August 22, 2008

“The word is like a little bag into which I put an image or an idea. We send it off into the air like a shell; it bursts, and the idea of the image is parachuted like radioactive fallout on to people’s shoulders. Speech is originally a pantomime of the mouth. There is therefore no break of continuity between a gesture and a word; both of them, physically, are part of the same creation, the result of a muscular contraction and a respiration.”

Jean-Louis Barrault, Souvenirs pour demain, (Memories for Tomorrow: The Memoirs of Jean-Louis Barrault, transl. Jonathan Griffin, 1974.)