top of page
.png){kind=small}
Language Quotes
"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
42
"The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!"
39
"In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth."
39
"This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America."
38
"Everything has changed. When I was at school and was told I had better learn English, I said: What for? The English are a hell of a long way away!"
37
"The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine."
27
"Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone."
27
"One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die."
24
"Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own."
21
"Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things."
21
"A movie of mine is going to be released in Japan next year. I play a waitress who's a really regular girl in this movie. The English title isn't decided yet, but in Japanese it's I'll Get on the A Train Sometime."
19
"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
19
"Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too."
17
"I think somebody who speaks the language is going to notice immediately that I'm not Russian."
15
"My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language."
15
"Grammar is the breathing power for the life of language."
15
"I've always enjoyed writing, I graduated with a degree in English; I've done bits of journalism."
14
"In the GNOME project we tried to keep the platform language independent."
14
"It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."
13
"Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt."
13
"Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear."
13
"The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language."
12
"The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs."
12
"I learned English, my sixth language at this point, quite quickly."
12
"When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware."
12
"In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary."
12
"A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs."
12
"Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language."
12
"You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language."
12
"I had one companion. He was a teacher from the Ukraine who spoke English so we could communicate a bit. I learnt a few Russian words, but it was hard to concentrate."
11
"That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way."
11
"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."
11
"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
11
"I'd forgotten I'd done the anime called Spirited Away, the English version of a Japanese film."
11
"Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek."
10
"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."
10
"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
10
bottom of page