Language Quotes - Page 2

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

Dexter Palmer

Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.

James Joyce

They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.

Paul Celan

It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language.

Ben Marcus

I believe language is infinitely malleable, a live being in our hands, which deserves our great respect and curiosity

Brian Kiteley

The language of the heartIs the only languageThat everybody can understand.

Sri Chinmoy

To speak only one language is to do yourself a great injustice.

Michelle Templet

And on the way home I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

Muriel Barbery

I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose.

Sol Stein

I think we can all agree that the official language of the United States should be Latin.

Michelle Templet

Argot is both a literary and a social phenomenon. What is argot, properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery.

Victor Hugo

No," I replied testily. "I'm pretty sure 'digital' is Latin for 'fingeral,' so finger cancer equals digital cancer. This is all basic anatomy, Dr. Roland." The Dr. Roland told me that he thought I was overreacting, and the "fingeral" wasn't even a real word. Then I told him that I though he was underreacting, probably because he's embarrassed that he doesn't know how Latin works. Then he claimed that "underrecating" isn't a word either. The man has a terrible bedside manner.

Jenny Lawson

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

John Steinbeck

We feel more than we can express, we see more than we can say.

Marty Rubin

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

George Orwell

How beautiful to touch another's soul with a word, a gesture, a thought.

Marty Rubin

Because you think your language is the best language? That because you were born and your parents babbled to you in this tongue, that it is the best language to speak? How small is your mind.

Jeff Wheeler

Loose and forbear!

Mark Twain

This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

Mark Twain

...it was another year or two before I discovered that drat and draft were different words. During that same period I remember believing that details were dentals and that a bitch was an extremely tall woman. A son of a bitch was apt to be a basketball player. When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank" (27-8).

Stephen King

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.

Richard Chenevix Trench

Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.

William Shakespeare

I phoned the Admiral back.'It's no use, Admiral, the French speak nothing but French.'There was a short pause on the end of the line then his voice rattled into life like a sabre.'They're lying, Tim!''What?''The French Navy must by law speak English, as English is the international maritime language of the sea.''Has anyone told the French that?'The line went dead for a moment before he thundered, 'Yes Nelson. At the battle of Trafalgar.'I tried to stifle an irresistibly British giggle not knowing if the Admiral was making a joke or not. I got it right. He was serious.

Tim FitzHigham

The more clearly we are able to express ourselves, the less room there is for ambiguity. The more elaborate and the more precise our vocabulary, the greater the scope for thought and expression. Language is about subtlety and nuance. It is power and it is potent. We can woo with words and we can wound. Despots fear the words of the articulate opponent. Successful revolutions are achieved with words as much as with weapons.

John Humphrys

A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.

Bernard Bloch

Going around in life using German, which Margaret had learned only a few years before, was like walking around in high heels--although it drove up the aesthetic rush of going out on the town, it was dreadfully uncomfortable after a while, and there were certain places you couldn't go

Ida Hattemer-Higgins

Music is a language - and language, at its finest, should be music.

T.L. Rese

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

William Penn

Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.

Roland Barthes

The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it.

Jonathan Culver

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.

Roland Barthes

You should really stay true to your own style. When I first started writing, everybody said to me, 'Your style just isn't right because you don't use the really flowery language that romances have.' My romances - compared to what's out there - are very strange, very odd, very different. And I think that's one of the reasons they're selling.

Jude Deveraux

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

Catharine A. MacKinnon

As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.

Nataly Kelly

Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

Ben Marcus

Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone.

Nataly Kelly

...you do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ...

John Geddes

In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.

Nataly Kelly

AimlesslyIt pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. NoOne listens to poetry.— from "Thing Language

Jack Spicer

Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?

Nataly Kelly

Of the 193 recognized countries in the world, only politically isolated North Korea is considered monolingual.

Nataly Kelly

I fell in love the moment I saw her in her grandfather's kitchen, her dark curls crashing over her Portuguese shoulders. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she smiled.'I'm really not that thirsty.''What? What you say?' Her English wasn't too good. Now I'm seventy-three and she's just turned seventy. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she asked me today, smiling. 'I'm really not that thirsty.''What? What you say?' Neither of us has the gift of language acquisition. After fifty years of marriage we have never really spoken, but we love each other more than words can say.

Dan Rhodes

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

To deny access to translation and interpreting services oppresses human rights and violates laws.

Nataly Kelly

...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...

John Geddes

Have you heard," he said "that many of our people believe if you know five colloquial expressions in their tribal language, they must always provide you with nourishment and shelter? But-" He paused as though to make sure she was paying attention. "But if you know fewer than five, they owe you not even a sip of water."She nodded, understanding his point, but he pressed it."Learn those five phrases, Miss Sweeney," he said.

Masha Hamilton

Because different cultures see a particular animal as representing a certain human virtue or vice, the use of animal imagery also allows for more colorful commentary on the human condition.

Larry Herzberg

There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words Helen, hello, help. This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into dipthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie, for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught in surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay.

Tony Burgess

My Japanese isn’t much better today, but at least now I appreciate my duality more than when I was a punk kid.

Gil Asakawa

Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary – I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does.

Anis Mojgani

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting.

Franz Kafka

Striving to convey to this beloved audience of one what was going on around me during those five years, I learned the power of language to map a life, to overcome a distance, to focus attention on what matters most.

Scott Russell Sanders

The language of mathematics differs from that of everyday life, because it is essentially a rationally planned language. The languages of size have no place for private sentiment, either of the individual or of the nation. They are international languages like the binomial nomenclature of natural history. In dealing with the immense complexity of his social life man has not yet begun to apply inventiveness to the rational planning of ordinary language when describing different kinds of institutions and human behavior. The language of everyday life is clogged with sentiment, and the science of human nature has not advanced so far that we can describe individual sentiment in a clear way. So constructive thought about human society is hampered by the same conservatism as embarrassed the earlier naturalists. Nowadays people do not differ about what sort of animal is meant by Cimex or Pediculus, because these words are used only by people who use them in one way. They still can and often do mean a lot of different things when they say that a mattress is infested with bugs or lice. The study of a man's social life has not yet brought forth a Linnaeus. So an argument about the 'withering away of the State' may disclose a difference about the use of the dictionary when no real difference about the use of the policeman is involved. Curiously enough, people who are most sensible about the need for planning other social amenities in a reasonable way are often slow to see the need for creating a rational and international language.

Lancelot Hogben

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Anthony Marra

I’m sorry.’ The two most inadequate words in the English language.

Beth Revis

I like to see an angry Englishman," said Poirot. "They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.

Agatha Christie

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

Jack Gilbert

But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

Carl Sagan

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

Ann Patchett

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

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Language Quotes - Page 2

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