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"Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem."
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"Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies."
"Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling."
"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?"
"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."
"Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."
"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."
"The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words."
"I want to hear you wound my lovely language with your rough barbarian tongue."
Explore more quotes by James Merrill
"Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images."
"But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice."
"And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five."
"Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication."
"He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline."
"At college I'd seen my dead frog's limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other - seen, but hadn't believed. Didn't dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw."
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