p.222 At its simplest, the narrative is an uninterrupted series of victories
of life over death.
p.279 The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the
word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own
object in a dialogic way.
p.280 But this does not exhaust the internal dialogism of the word.
It encounters an alien word not only in the object itself: every word is directed toward an answer and cannot
escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates.
The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly,
oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer's direction.
Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been
said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation in any living dialogue.
p.293-294 the word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes
“one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates
the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not
exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but
rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions:
it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.
