“All thoughts are in the world even before they are thought. They are dispersed among the elements of language. The artist gathers them together and welds them into his thought. (Karl Kraus) once said: ‘Language is the divining-rod which discovers wells of thought.’ Thus language, for him, is a means not so much of communicating what he knows, but of finding out what he does not yet know. Words are living organisms, not labels stuck to objects. They are at home in a cosmos of the spirit, not in a chance assembly of ‘atoms of perception’. Each of them has a range of its own, and once struck, opens up numberless trains of thought. The greater the number of associations into which the words enters, the greater its value in a piece of writing.”
from Erich Heller: The Disinherited Mind; Harmondsworth, 1961, p. 209f.
