When I speak English, I've been told, I have this patrician way of speaking that's very irritating. It's the whole class thing.
What you say is who you are. How you say it is your style.
I've always been very in tune to my voice and to other people's voices and how they express themselves vocally. And I always loved accents and dialects - I collected them like stamps.
Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.
You might not be what you say you are, but what you say, you are.
It's very hard to find your own words - and you don't actually exist until you have your own words.
I love accents.
...sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.
One of the first issues I dealt with was the struggle to find a language, to find my own words.
