Language Quotes - Page 6

What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don’t have language for. What fascinates me about that is we’re talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It’s almost a paradox that you’re seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn’t have language for it.

Stuart Dybek

We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you're an ass.

Alena Graedon

You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover.

Thomm Quackenbush

What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.

Mikhail Bakhtin

(on the word "fuck")'Oh, come on, Mum,' I sighed at her protest. 'It's just an old Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ which has been adopted by an inherently misogynist language as a negative epithet. It's the same as "fuck", it basically means the same as copulate, but the latter is perfectly acceptable. Why? Because copulate has its roots in Latin and Latin reminds us that we are a sophisticated, learned species, not the rutting animals that these prehistoric grunts would have us appear to be, and isn't that really the issue here? We don't want to admit that we are essentially animals? We want to distinguish ourselves from the fauna with grand conceits and elaborate language; become angels worthy of salvation, not dumb creatures consigned to an earthly, terminal end. It's just a word, Mum; a sound meaning a thing; and your disgust is just denial of a greater horror: that our consciousness is not an indication of our specialness but the terrifying key to knowing how truly insignificant we are.'She told me to got fuck myself.

Simon Pegg

...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

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

George Orwell

The Latin word for sausage was botulus, from which English gets two words. One of them is the lovely botuliform, which means sausage-shaped and is a more useful word than you might think. The other word is botulism.Sausages may taste lovely, but it's usually best not to ask what's actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

Mark Forsyth

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

George Steiner

Bad and cruel as our people were treated by the whites, not one of themwas hurt or molested by our band. (...) The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upontheir rights. They made it appear that they were the injured party, andwe the intruders. They called loudly to the great war chief to protecttheir property.How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make rightlook like wrong, and wrong like right.

Black Hawk

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.

Ursula K Le Guin

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly.

Robert M. Pirsig

The stars have their own language, you know. If you're careful, you can learn it.

Sarah Jio

The worst kind of oppression is when the victims think and talk in the language of their oppressors.

M.F. Moonzajer

Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’? Schadenfreude.

John Dolan

Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet.

J.R.R. Tolkien

To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.

Rex Stout

When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others--using it as a way of setting themselves apart and shutting out strangers.

Charlotte Lamb

Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical.

Jeanette Winterson

Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.

Elizabeth Winder

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

Music is the great unifier. It doesn’t matter which country you’re in or what language is being spoken, the fans just magically seem to get it. They share a common goal of love and celebration for the purity of magnificence and brilliance that has been created by the artist. It’s transcendent. It’s inspiration. It’s raw emotion. It’s communication – a perfect marriage of notes, harmonies, lyrics and melodies. It’s the beauty within the beast.

J.M. Nevins

I should think a dead language would be rather boring, sociallyspeaking.

Sol Luckman

I had a dream about you last night... we tried to joke but neither could make any sense. We realized that puns are present in every language, though not shared by any of them.

Marshall Ramsay

Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun - all those exciting verbs that don't come unit the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.

Libba Bray

Language, because it is imperfect, cannot encompass experience in its raw and primal condition. To verbalize emotion and action is to decrease their impact.

Cirilo F. Bautista

The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.

John Sinclair

Sometimes we speak different languages, but our hearts are the same.

Mykyta Isagulov

The language of nature is silence.

Bryant McGill

I'm online, therefore I am.

Stewart Lee Beck

The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot.

Benny Lewis

They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.

Donna Tartt

Thank you,’ I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. “May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift”; “Beauty is in the eyes that find me pretty”; “May Allah never deny your prayer”; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere “thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful.” (169).

Susan Abulhawa

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

Each asana is like a sound or letter in an alphabet. Every letter in an alphabet produces a unique sound vibration. Each asana vibrates at a specific frequency. When asanas are performed in sequence, beautiful phrases or sutras result, producing a mystical language.

Sharon Gannon

Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.

Octavio Paz

We believe that information is an enlightening agent, but I can assure you it is not. We consume information, but we can’t read. We forgot how to sit down and engage the dense layers of a text. We are so busy devouring information that we forgot how to dance with ideas. We confuse linguistic bits of data for knowledge and ideas. I can assure you, gentlemen, they are not the same. Ideas require effort and the kind of sensibility that engages the subtle layers of meaning. What the hell does information require?

R.F. Georgy

I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.

Aimee Bender

You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

Peter Watts

The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Learning a language is not interesting than knowing how it works.

Ritesh Shrivastav

Sex is a matter of biology, while gender is a matter of grammar, and there is no earthly reason why sex should be involved in gender distinctions.

R.L. Trask

I like the way he says we and am amazed, as I often am by language as power, at the way a simple pronoun can upend a relationship.

Fiona Maazel

Whenever I write a paragraph in English, I first check it with the Google Translator, and most often it says no language detected.

M.F. Moonzajer

Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people and events in great part shaped by the very language in which we describe them? When we try to describe one person to another or to a group, what do we say? Not usually how or what that person ate, rarely what he wore, only occasionally how he managed his job -- no, what we tell is what he said and, if we are good mimics, how he said it. We apparently consider a person's spoken words the true essence of his being.

Cleanth Brooks

To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects.

Gregory C. Carlson

Words in the head are sticky and social creatures – when you finally pull one out, you're liable to get lots of bits of meanings that have rubbed onto them as a result of their palling around with other words.

Gregory C. Carlson

Man acts as though he were the sharper and the master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger

In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character. They are of no particular interest in themselves, but only insofar as they constitute evidence that permits one to determine fundamental features of the real world, within a course of inquiry that is invariably undertaken under sharp idealizations, often implicit and simply common understanding, but always present.

Noam Chomsky

You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.

Lily King

Dad says there are more than three thousand letters in the Japanese alphabet, which could pose a problem. There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and I get into enough trouble with them as it is.

Rin Chupeco

Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech.

Gene Wolfe

The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.

Lorrie Moore

Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that poets, or writers, or whoever it was that was in charge of devising new words, could keep pace with those hectic geometers, and slap names on all the whorls and snarls in the pages of the Doctor's geometry-books.

Neal Stephenson

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: "Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political." (112)They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity?

Gilles Deleuze

The language, feminine desires to speak, and her first phrase to express her love to him - *blush*

Saravana Kumar Murugan

The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather "opens things up to the light of Heaven" by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to "illumine," for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over.

Hakim Bey

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

The polyglot is a linguistic nomad.

Rosi Braidotti

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Language Quotes - Page 6

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