Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 80

...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional “victims” who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.
Gad Saad
Every writer dreams of a perfect language. Every writer dreams of a language that obeys, that comes to heel. For some this language is spare and pure, pared down to reveal essential truths without ornament or obfuscation. For others it is devilish and twisting, folding back over itself to create layers of meaning, shades of nuance.A language that will survive through the ages.A language that will crack open the heart of readers like a hazelnut.
Helen Marshall
You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.
Peter Watts
Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.
Steven Pinker
You all right?" he said again.I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was."Yes," I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.
Margaret Atwood
I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.
Steven Pinker
Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don’t believe me? Get with the program, crackpot!
Barry Webster
They spoke in semaphore, all punctuation unnecessary.“You?”“Great.”They’d trimmed the language to its essentials. Before long it would just be consonants. Then silence.
Louise Penny
Toxemia. A word that starts so harsh and ends so gently.
Emma Hooper
Super 8 film is the language of silence.
Rebecca McNutt
Adam was charming and spoke perfect French. Like many anglophones in Montréal, he actually spoke French better than we did. They knew exactly which verbs to use in the same way that people knew which utensils to use while eating at a fancy dinner. It was very proper because they learned it from books. They didn’t know slang or how to curse. They didn’t know how to do anything other than be proper and reserved. It was state-sponsored, dry-clean-only French.
Heather O'Neill
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.
Marshall McLuhan
When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.
Steven Pinker
Astronomy is not the science of all objects with mass and weight and velocity. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Biology is not the science of all objects that consume and excrete and have inherited characteristics. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Linguistics is not the study of all possible symbols or symbol systems. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies.
Randy Allen Harris
Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency"—the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why?
Steven Pinker
The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counter-example in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself), and gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a "featherless biped" and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken.
Steven Pinker
The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.
Steven Pinker
And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fiddle-faddle and not faddle- fiddle? Why is it ping-pong and pitter-patter rather than pong-ping and patter-pitter? Why dribs and drabs, rather than vice versa? Why can't a kitchen be span and spic? Whence riff-raff, mish-mash, flim-flam, chit-chat, tit for tat, knick-knack, zig-zag, sing-song, ding-dong, King Kong, criss-cross, shilly-shally, see-saw, hee-haw, flip-flop, hippity-hop, tick-tock, tic-tac-toe, eeny-meeny-miney-moe, bric-a-brac, clickety-clack, hickory-dickory-dock, kit and kaboodle, and bibbity-bobbity-boo? The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back.
Steven Pinker
For the first time, I understood the ancients' need to find explanations for why things happen. It's a quintessential human imperative. Random is not emotionally satisfying. Therefore, lightning was the bolt from an angry god. Crop failure was punishment for failing to honor the gods with a fatted calf. The plague happened because you took the Lord's name in vain or coveted your neighbor's wife. Going to church regularly and praying could forestall illness. And on and on.
Alanna Mitchell
You are the language so universalyou are forgottenBe my linguistTurn meinto your words.
Bänoo Zan
Language was just that thing that happened when you opened your mouth at the table, squeezed a few noises out of your vocal chords, and induced Socrates thereby to pass the salt.
Randy Allen Harris
As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully.
Steven Pinker
Death was in every fibre of these creatures. It was hidden in their languages and at the root of their civilizations. You could hear it in the sounds they made and see it in the way they moved. It darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair.
André Alexis
Otaku (おた) is also a formal way of saying "you". た means "house", and with the honorific お, it literally means "your honorable house", implying that you are less of a person and more of a place, fixed in space and contained under a roof. Makes sense that the stereotype of the modern otaku is a shut-in, an obsessed loner and social isolate who rarely leaves his house.
Ruth Ozeki
Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.
Steven Pinker
This is an odd one. You have one country in the world where a word has a deeper meaning, it can really mess with design plans. ...But we have a difficult situation here so I guess we'll be looking at putting different sound chips in the dolls heading there [Britain].
Todd McFarlane
The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
Adam Gopnik
We are never half so interesting when we have learned that language is given us to enable us to conceal our thoughts.
L.M. Montgomery
Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.
Douglas Coupland
Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.
S.I. Hayakawa
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
Adam Gopnik
With every fragment of rock that fall from me, I can hear the voice of Marianne Engle. I love you. Aishiteru. Ego amo te. Ti amo. Eg elska pig. Ich liebe dich. It is moving across time, coming to me in every language of the world, and it sounds like pure love.
Andrew Davidson
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.
Robert Bringhurst
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
Margaret Atwood
If you buy your experience it's your own. So it's no matter how much you pay for it.
L.M. Montgomery
...don't settle for pap - our thoughts wander through eternity - experience the wonder of being alive...
John Geddes
Explore, experience, evolve, and exceed your expectations! - No Excuses!
Lorii Myers
Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
Basic personality traits develop early in life and over time become inviolable, hardwired. Most people learn little from experience, rarely thinking of adjusting their behavior, see problems as emanating from those around them, and keep on doing what they do in spite of everything, for better or worse.
A.S.A. Harrison
...on opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night before had been very turbid was perfectly clear: all the bacteria had vanished... as for my agar spread it was devoid of all growth and what caused my emotion was that in a flash I understood: what causes my spots was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria. Another thought came to me also, If this is true, the same thing will have probably occurred in the sick man. In his intestine, as in my test-tube, the dysentery bacilli will have dissolved away under the action of their parasite. He should now be cured.
Félix d'Herelle
Thoughts of harmony allow experiences of harmony.
Vironika Tugaleva
Wisdom is the central form which gives meaning and position to all the facts which are acquired by knowledge, the digestion and assimilation of whatever in the material world the man comes in contact with.
Northrop Frye
Do not confuse your horizon with the edge of the world.
Seb Paquet
It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks.
Adam Gopnik
She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience.
Wade Davis
Experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted.
Margaret Atwood
If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.
Eleanor Catton
We need to live our experience as it is and with our eyes open. The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.
Lawrence M. Krauss
We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same.
Mary Balogh
When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.
Yann Martel
Someone told me once, ‘It’s time to get you a pair of overalls, boy.’ But I don’t believe in summing up nothin’ – I let my experiences speak for themselves – and even if I did, a synopsis should be singular. That’s why every time I go out to work in the fields, I work naked. It lets my neighbors speak of my experiences for me.
M.C. Humphreys
We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.
Michael Ondaatje
Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
Eckhart Tolle
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.
Eckhart Tolle
I just sit where I'm put, composedof stone and wishful thinking:that the deity who kills for pleasurewill also heal,that in the midst of your nightmare,the final one, a kind lionwill come with bandages in her mouthand the soft body of a woman,and lick you clean of fever, and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neckand caress you into darkness and paradise.
Louise Penny
Shine and shimmer my Harvest Moon,illuminate the shadows in the sky.
A.F. Stewart
The moon twangs its silver strings;The river swoons into town;The wind beds down in the pines,Covers itself with stars.
George Elliott Clarke
In school, I hated poetry - those skinny,Malnourished poems that professors love;The bad grammar and dirty words that catchIn the mouth like fishhooks, tear holes in speech.Pablo, your words are rain I run through,Grass I sleep in.
George Elliott Clarke
How many great gems were lost to thoughtand not put down to pen.You can but think of just a fewand then they're lost again.
L.F.Young