Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Harrison

Harrison is taking a wrecking ball to the most comfortable assumption we have about language: that words are obedient little couriers carrying meaning from one mind to another. “To liberate words” sounds like a humanist slogan until he snaps it in half with “first to shatter their function.” Liberation, in this framing, isn’t about speaking freely; it’s about freeing language from the moral duties we assign it - to remember, to persuade, to console, to testify. The list (“idea, memory, hope, or regret”) reads like the full emotional workload of writing, and Harrison is daring writers to step away from that labor.

The subtext is a suspicion of language as a tool of utility. If words are primarily “vehicles,” they’re always instrumental, always on errands: selling an argument, preserving a past, promising a future, performing remorse. Shattering that function points toward a more radical aesthetic project - words as material, sound, rhythm, texture, interruption. Think of modernist and postmodern impulses: poetry that refuses paraphrase, fiction that treats narrative as a trap, essays that expose how “meaning” gets staged. The violence of “shatter” matters; you don’t gently reform a vehicle, you crash it.

Contextually, this reads like a manifesto against sentimental writing and against political language that pretends to be transparent. Harrison’s intent isn’t to ban meaning but to break the automatic pipeline between word and intention, so that language can surprise its author again. The paradox is the point: you “liberate” words by stripping them of the very purposes we use to justify them.