p.319 People often talk silently to themselves, engaging in what is called inner speech, internal conversation, inner dialogue, self talk and so on. This seems to be an inherent characteristic of human beings, commented on as early as Plato (Theaetetus 189e-190a and Sophist 263e), who regarded thought as inner speech. The American pragmatists thought the inner dialogue was the defining feature of the self (Archer 2003, pp. 53-92). For them the self is an internal community or network, communicating within itself in a field of meaning.

p.321 inner speech functions as a guide or mapping device through life.

p.324 When words get their meaning from events peculiar to us, circumscribed by our own intra-subjectivity and completely meaningless in interpersonal conversation, we are in the house of egocentric vocabulary. These packed-with-meaning expressions give our inner speech its emotional flexibility and contribute to its lightning speed. They also show that some things, which are easily handleable in inner speech, cannot be introduced in outer speech at all. This is our own, private little world. It is nobody's business but our own, and it does tasks for us that could not be accomplished in any other way.

p.326 To discover that you are a self must clear up all sorts of problems. You half knew it before, because you were using it. You were making things happen, even though they seemed to be happening to you. You had a visceral if indistinct sense of your self all along. In fact you probably had been listening to that, sometimes bewildering, self in the internal conversation for quite a while. This self is the other end of the inner dialogue. That dialogical partner is not your mother or some outside authority; it is another part of you. And the conversation is private, no one can hear it, and you can talk about anything you want.
 This discovery of self is a crucial step in the fleshing out of inner speech, for now the person has control of both ends of the conversation and can use it to its full potential.

p.327 Presumably the child will take a while getting used to this new faculty, but this power will soon become the clearing house for all aspects of the child. Desires, fears, habits, and understandings will now come together in the newly cleared field of consciousness. This field will be organized by what is now the fully-formed dialogical self, referred to by George Herbert Mead as the I-me relation and by Charles Sanders Peirce as the I-you (the you being one's immediately future self as it is gradually approaching in the field of time).

p.329 We are little gods in the world of inner speech. We are the only ones, we run the show, we are the boss. This world is almost a little insane, for it lacks the usual social controls, and we can be as bad or as goofy as we want.

p.337-338 Humans are the authors of their actions to a great extent, but the way this process works is difficult to understand. I would suggest that inner speech is both the locus and platform for agency.
 Charles Sanders Peirce was under the impression that we guide our lives with inner speech. We choose internally in the zone of inner speech, and then we choose externally in the zone of practical action and the outer world. The first choice leads to the second choice... by first modelling them in our internal theater... we could visualize the performance of a particular action and also choose to perform this action (Colapietro 1989, pp. 99-118).