Language Quotes - Page 11

Your language looks like a treasure map,' she said, 'if you forget all the rest of the letters and focus in on the x, it looks as if you could find out where the treasure is.

Kirmen Uribe

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Carl Sandburg

Siarad Cymraeg?" said Old Shacob."He wants to know if you speak Welsh," said the surveyor."NO!" yelled the official at the old man before him."Tamn it all; his language, man!" shouted Dan. "What you expect in Wales - Chinese, or what?!

Geraint Goodwin

I refuse to be linguistically constrained by dictionary writers.

Amy E. Reichert

If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.

Robert M. Pirsig

We each have our own language.Our own way of thinking, of talking to ourselves, of making sense of the world and putting it in order. A narration style that is ours and ours alone. That's why some of us connect and some of us don't. Because even though we can only live in our own heads, sometimes - every now and then - we meet a person we can talk to without speaking at all: whose story we can read, without even trying.

Holly Smale

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

One's identity derives not from one's nation or blood but from the language one uses.

Minae Mizumura

At the end of the second week they were still working and Arretapec, Conway and their patient were being talked, whistled, cheeped and grunted about in every language in use at the hospital.

James White

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. The answer isn't just to introduce new words (boi, cis-gendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously there is power and pragmatism here). One must also become alert to the multitude of possible uses, possible contexts, the wings with which each word can fly. Like when you whisper, You're just a hold, letting me fill you up. Like when I say husband.

Maggie Nelson

What the devil is 'wordsharing'? Does the word for 'speak' mean 'listen' just as well? If I said, 'Listen to me!' you might talk, instead.""What use is the one without the other? It took me a long time to see this distinction in Valan speech."Spinel thought over the list of 'share forms': learnsharing, worksharing, lovesharing. "Do you say 'hitsharing,' too? If I hit a rock with a chisel, does the rock hit me?""I would think so. Don't you feel it in your arm?"He frowned and sought a better example; it was so obvious, it was impossible to explain. "I've got it: if Beryl bears a child, does the child bear Beryl? That's ridiculous.""A mother is born when her child comes.""Or if I swim in the sea, does the sea swim in me?""Does it not?"Helplessly he thought, She can't be that crazy. "Please, you do know the difference, don't you?""Of course. What does it matter?

Joan Slonczewski

To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.

Alexander McCall Smith

Jerkish". That was the name of a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees - and there was no doubt (...) that more and more unfortunate creatures would be able to talk to each other in jerkish. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak, and because that language would spread rapidly from pole to pole, to the east and the west, it would be the language of the future.

Ivan Klíma

Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being

Trevor Noah

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

Edith Wharton

Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write” Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write

George Sand

But the sheep had taught him something even more important: that there was a universal language in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time that he was trying to improve things at the shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.

Paulo Coelho

To start speaking my language start reading what I read... start reading what I have written. Listen to what I have listened.

Deyth Banger

Whenever the nature of the subject permits the reasoning process to be without danger carried on mechanically, the language should be constructed on as mechanical principles as possible; while in the contrary case it should be so constructed, that there shall be the greatest possible obstacle to a mere mechanical use of it

John Stuart Mill

The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

C.S. Lewis

There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

Patrice Nganang

I've tried to use sex in place of language, but no one yet has been capable of processing the imagery, references, and metaphors I imbue into my thrusts, so I've returned to common English.

Jacqueline Novak

The language we use can subtly influence our thinking. […]On the face of it, the term “web platform” seems harmless. Describing the web as a platform puts it on par with other software environments. Flash was a platform. Android is a platform. iOS is a platform. But the web is not a platform. The whole point of the web is that it is cross‐platform.

Jeremy Keith

The degree to which language exactly mirrors reality is debatable.

Rictor Norton

Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on."I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least-at least I mean what I say-that's the same thing, you know.""Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!""You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same thing as 'I get what I like'!""You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!""It is the same thing with you." said the Hatter,

Lewis Carroll

The Almost Forgotten Human Language is ‘Feeling.

Jasz Gill

I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree:Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.

John DeFrancis

When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person.

George Orwell

, Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: "The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way round.""The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly."Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I'm keeping you. Good-bye, Periel," and he was gone.

Charles Williams

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former

Ben Lerner

So many people understand language, but few people understand the real meaning of language. They that understand the meaning of language understand language and life better!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Language is where the tongue fails itself over & over again.

Christopher Soto

Language lives in the mind, moves around with the tongue and gets its meaning in action!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

There's a world of difference between, "Look at this mess you made!" and "I don't like to see food on the floor!

Joanna Faber

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

Our children's won't learn Kurdish Language fluently if we don't tech them.

Davan Yahya Khalil

If you'd combat bigotry, use honest language and call things out for what they really are.

DaShanne Stokes

Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.

David Crystal

I was born with my voice in my hands.

Kathryn Lomer

We live at the level of our language.

Ellen Gilchrist

As you may follow, they are an extremely hostile species (i.e. there is no word for ‘welcome’ in the Ruminarii language.) In four short centuries they had managed to lay waste to almost a thousand star systems, enslaving their populations and stripping them of all they wanted.

Christina Engela

The most satisfying of languages, Latin.

Donna Tartt

Her face looked for the answer that is always concealed in language.

John Steinbeck

Falling in love is like learning a whole new language and the culture that goes along with it. When you fall out of love it can be hard to pick up where you left off and start a new.

Isabella Poretsis

The written word is what distinguishes us from all other animal life forms on this earth.

Mommy Moo Moo

If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world.

James Rozoff

I am beginning to worry that my speech is becoming a rather incomprehensible mixture of a Victorian woman, an Australian Beach Bum and a Laddish city boy

C.S. Woolley

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

William H. Gass

Carmen's speciality is national news, and her greatest pleasure is finding inconsistencies in the declarations of politicians: syntactical errors, and – why not? – howlers. The one she has the most fun with is the mayor. Someone who can't speak shouldn't be in charge of a city, she's always saying. And, far from being elitist, her observation alludes to the obvious contempt a certain affluent social class – from which the mayor hails – feels for language (words, meaning, syntax, conjugation, use of prepositions, solipsisms) and which she, a secondary-teacher of language and literature for more than thirty years, refuses to countenance.

Claudia Piñeiro

Silence is the mother of all tongues

Sudheer Reddy

I will treat language with resigned delight, embrace it like unrequited love, offer words to you with a kind of secret shame, for I know that sometimes there is such a thing as too much language, and that language can hold a kind of sincerity that is tiresome and overwrought.

Meia Geddes

Language, as much as land, is a place. To be cut off from it is to be, in a sense, homeless.

Lauren Collins

A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.

John Berger

Uh, she said maybe your eyes matched the Fog like a synchronous magnetic field?” “I don’t even know what language that is.

Joel N. Ross

By sabotaging logic, the common frame of reference, and the common language, we have removed a "safety valve" that allows cultural divides to be resolved.

Mike Klepper

before men could speak they enjoyed confounding another with signsthey enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an imageas much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave

Frank Stanford

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.

Donna Tartt

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.

John Berger

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal

John Berger

One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.

Donna Tartt

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Language Quotes - Page 11

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