Language Quotes - Page 3

That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.

Emil M. Cioran

He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place—cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing laurel that had proved poisonous to some of our hard-got tegs. But there had been no cats or lambs here until we brought them. So when he named a plant or a creature, I felt that I heard the true name of the thing for the first time.

Geraldine Brooks

We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.I have no native tongue.

Chuck Palahniuk

But language is wine upon his lips

Virginia Woolf

A conglomerate of complicated words, they confuse, condemn and cajole, created, he is sure, for the sole purpose of fuddling the listener, which in this case is regrettably him.

Curtis Ackie

I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happiness was defined by upwardly mobile consumerism, Kerouac etched a different existence and he wrote in an original language.

Sterling Lord

You should never let a word control you, intimidate you, or make you uncomfortable, and that applies to people of all races. Intent is where insult lies, and hate. Not in language.

Felix Clay

My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled to say even the simplest things. There was a certain pleasure in this, I believe – to experience language as a collection of sounds, to be forced to the surface of words where meanings vanish – but it was also quite wearing, and it had the effect of shutting me up in my thoughts.

Paul Auster

Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator.

Nataly Kelly

And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity

Guy Deutscher

But doesn't add something to what has come before; but takes something away. At its most daring, it can feel like a Bat Turn, a 180-degree spin int the Batmobile. Make that a But Turn.

Roy Peter Clark

Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the white peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.

Franz Rosenzweig

The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands—it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language.

William Lindsay Gresham

its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent

Mark O'Connell

The problem Creationists identify is with the word 'theory', not with the case for evolution

Lance Parkin

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

Jacques Lacan

If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned.

Kim Thúy

Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain. It´s about declaring what is just and what is unjust, and distinguishing right from wrong. We don´t grasp these things silently, and then put words to them; language is the medium through which we discern and deliberate about the good.

Michael J. Sandel

They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.

Orson Scott Card

Never mistake legibility for communication.

David Carson

We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.

Robert Kelly

...he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody's always talking about. They want it to be easy and it's just not going to be.

Ben Fountain

She walks to a tableShe walk to table She is walking to a tableShe walk to table now What difference does it makeWhat difference it make In Nature, no completenessNo sentence really complete thought Language, like woman,Look best when free, undressed.

Wang Ping

What you should do," she told Fat during one of his darker hours, "is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34." Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union's salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat's, since without the T-34 he would be speaking - not english or Latin or the koine - but German.

Philip K Dick

I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked - Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English).

Manil Suri

Whether the vessel is a legal document or a rap song, language is often chosen ot exclude. To use a scholarly phrase, "discourse communities" are often gated,so it's the good writer's job to offer readers a set of keys.

Roy Peter Clark

In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry

Krista Tippett

Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages you speak.)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The ultimate language of yoga is expressed in doing yoga, a practice that transcends words as we open our lives to living more consciously through the infinite wisdom of the heart.

Mark Stephens

I wanted to say a certain thing to a certain man, a certain true thing that had crept into my head. I opened my head, at the place provided, and proceeded to pronounce the true thing that lay languishing there—that is, proceeded to propel that trueness, that felicitous trularity, from its place inside my head out into world life. The certain man stood waiting to receive it. His face reflected an eager accepting-ness. Everything was right. I propelled, using my mind, my mouth, all my muscles. I propelled. I propelled and propelled. I felt trularity inside my head moving slowly through the passage provided (stained like the caves of Lascaux with garlic, antihistamines, Berloiz, a history, a history) toward its debut on the world stage. Past my teeth, with their little brown sweaters knitted of gin and cigar smoke, toward its leap to critical scrutiny. Past my lips, with their tendency to flake away in cold weather—

Donald Barthelme

There is a rhythm to our language. they echo the rhythm of our life.

ninotaziz

When animals do something noble we say they are behaving ‘like humans’. When humans do something disgusting we say they are behaving ‘like animals’. Clumsy use of the English language perpetuates the myth that animals are inferior and disposable beings.

Phillip Wollen

If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.

Samuel Johnson

The language I learned was pretty, full of passivity and silence. I had no proper language for the issues of blood and anger, yet much of what went on when I was a child made me angry. There were no words a nice girl could use to describe anger; her options were to remain silent or to use indiscreet language, the kind that curls in a room like smoke and soon disappears. We girls were taught to speak safely and to bandage our anger with polite, pretty words. We might talk about the anger only in questions and sighs, unable to curse, yell or break windows in the beautiful garden.

Beth Bagley

[L]anguage functions best when we mediate between the descriptive and prescriptive influences, changing the rules to better suit some things, but sticking to them for others.

John Wiswell

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. "I hate this language. It changes too often!

Rick Riordan

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

George Steiner

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

Brian Friel

HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.

George Bernard Shaw

HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge...

George Bernard Shaw

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

Patrick Cockburn

[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside’ rather than ‘within’ us — or rather it exists ‘between’ us, as our relationships do.

Terry Eagleton

If someone said 'diametrically,' could 'opposed' be far behind?

Meg Wolitzer

How many Lojbanists does it take to change a brokenlight-bulb?” goes the old Lojban joke. “Two: one to decidewhat to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulbemits broken light.

Arika Okrent

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.

Osip Mandelstam

...there are no sweeter words in the English language (or any other) than husband and wife.

Lanier Ivester

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.

Terry Eagleton

A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton...

George Bernard Shaw

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Samuel Johnson

Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.

John Lawler

If you use the term 'over-exaggerate,' you know the definition neither of 'exaggerate' nor of 'over.

Rodney Ulyate

I can ask for cigarettes in every language

David Bowie

How different things might be if, rather than saying "I think I'm in love," we were saying "I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I'm on the way to knowing love." Or if instead of saying "I am in love" we say "I am loving" or "I will love." Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.

Bell Hooks

That’s when I have to ask him. “Can you really talk like that? Being holy and all?”“What? Because I’m a priest?” He finishes the dregs of his coffee. “Sure. God knows what’s important.

Markus Zusak

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

Angela Carter

Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

Elfriede Jelinek

i lost a whole continent.a whole continent from my memory.unlike all other hyphenated americans my hyphen is made of blood.when africa says hellomy mouth is a heartbreakbecause i have nothing in my tongueto answer her.i don’t know how to say hello to my mother.

african-american ii nayyirah waheed

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Language Quotes - Page 3

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