Ong One-Liners

Here are a few one-liners from Orality and Literacy:

"Proverbs from all over the world are rich with observations about this overwhelmingly human phenomenon of speech in its native oral form, about its powers, its beauties, its dangers." (p.9)
"When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it." (p.11)
"We have to die to continue living." (p.15)
"Heavy patterning and communal fixed formulas in oral cultures serve some of the purposes of writing in chirographic cultures, but in doing so they of course determine the kind of thinking that can be done, the way experience is intellectually organized." (p.36)
"When all verbal communication must be by direct word of mouth, involved in the give-and-take dynamics of sound, interpersonal relations are kept high - both attractions and, even more, antagonisms." (p.45)
"Nature states no 'facts': these come only within statements devised by human beings to refer to the seamless web of actuality around them." (p.67)
"Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world." (p.72)