Language Quotes - Page 19

When I asked if she read poetry anymore, she said no. she had lost her taste for it. That was how she said it, lost her taste. I asked how that could happen, and she said she agreed with Plato, or at least Plato as summarized for her: that there was something dishonest about it and that he was right to want to banish the poets. What she mean't, she told me, was that the only reality was life, real life, and that these beautiful versions were lies and she no longer had patience for it.

Daphne Kalotay

Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, "Gentlemen, let's proceed," and sensing Ellie's frown would add, "Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys." The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female.

Carl Sagan

One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt this before.

M.L. Rio

By claiming that our words are too hard to understand, the media perpetuates the idea that WE are too hard to understand, and suggests that there’s no point in trying.

C. N. Lester

His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.

Richard Mitchell

Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young.

David Brin

The Actor, noticing a closed bookshop, dismounted from the horse which he tied to a street lamp. He woke up the bookseller and bought a Spanish grammar and dictionary. He set out again across town marveling at the way that the words of the foreign language were freshly gathered fruits and not old and dry. They touched the senses marvelously, new like young beggars who accost you, not yet words but the every things they designate, happily running naked before being clothed again in abstraction.

Georges Limbour

The species greatest harvest ― words.

David Brin

She didn't know that all her life would be spent gambling with the stark rigidity of words, words that were coin: save, spend and all the time George with his own counter had found her a way out.

H.D.

I have tasted words, I have seen them. Never had her hands reached out in darkness and felt the texture of pure marble, never had her forehead bent forward and, as against a stone altar, felt safety. I am now saved. Her mind could not then so specifically have seen it, could not have said, "Now I will reveal myself in words, words may now supercede a scheme of mathematical-biological definition. Words may be my heritage and with words...A lady will be set back in the sky....there was hope in a block of unsubstantiated marble, words could carve and set up solid altars...Thought followed the wing that beat its silver into seven-branched larch boughs.

H.D.

The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as "snakes" or "roaches". This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that fellow humans were created in God's image.

Immaculée Ilibagiza

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

Richard Mitchell

She said the words, and then she had a strange moment of seeing them, hanging there over her head. "You're going to vacuum up that squi

Kate DiCamillo

Language is insight itself.

Confucius

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Siri Hustvedt

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind.

Teresa Jordan

Words can be medicines; they can also be poisons. Words can heal; they can also kill... It all depends on how, when and where they are use and against whom! Let us not abuse our words. It's a misuse of the tongue!

Israelmore Ayivor

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

Dan Simmons

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellowmen bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

Richard Mitchell

Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.("The Man Whom The Trees Loved")

Algernon Blackwood

Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else.

Derek Landy

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

The thing he said aloud did not succeed.

Tony Burgess

There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.

Victor Pelevin

The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.

Helmut Newton

A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.

Ari Marmell

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

Seamus Heaney

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.

John Dewey

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.

Confucius

Translation is the art of failure.

Umberto Eco

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words.I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret".Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

Jeffrey Eugenides

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.

David Sedaris

Just remember, when someone has an accent, it means that he knows one more language than you do.

Sidney Sheldon

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

Marguerite Duras

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

Sarah Dessen

Language does have the power to change reality. Therefore, treat your words as the mighty instruments they are - to heal, to bring into being, to remove, as if by magic, the terrible violations of childhood, to nurture, to cherish, to bless, to forgive - to create from the whole cloth of your soul, true love.

Daphne Rose Kingma

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets —no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Philip Roth

I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?

Rene Denfeld

They can be like the sun, words.They can do for the heart what light can for a field.

San Juan de la Cruz

Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute. The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.

Robert Herrick

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

Henry Hazlitt

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

Wilkie Collins

What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.

Aldous Huxley

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Roland Barthes

I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

Jack Gilbert

Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

Patricia A. McKillip

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.

Patrick Rothfuss

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

Virginia Woolf

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

Mark Slouka

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

Markus Zusak

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

James Joyce

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.

T.S Eliot

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

Patrick Rothfuss

And adab towards language means the recognition and acknowledgement of the rightful and proper place of every word in a written or uttered sentence so as not to produce a dissonance in meaning, sound and concept. Literature is called adabiyat in Islam precisely because it is seen as the keeper of civilization, the collector of teachings and statements that educate the self and society with adab such that both are elevated to the rank of the cultured man (insan adabi) and society.

Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former.

Northrop Frye

I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.

Penelope Lively

Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life ...

J.R.R. Tolkien

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.

Stephen King

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.

Heather O'Neill

Great language and great literature do not survive long without each other

Lance Conrad

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Language Quotes - Page 19

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