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"The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it."
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Exlpore more Language quotes
"What's the point of using words nobody knows or can say comfortably?"
"One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least."
"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is."
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
"Why people use "Was" I have heard some people to say "I was a smart kid at school - Eminem", but why "Was", was is a word for describing the past... which will mean that has started and ended... so what??? How to get it now? You aren't wise, are you?"
"Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters."
"Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language."
"In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language."
Explore more quotes by Helen Dunmore
"Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear."
"Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book."
"I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately."
"As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates."
"However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition."
"It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed."
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