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Language Quotes
"Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?"
5
"Because Shakespeare's language is so expansive, we're under this misconception that it's difficult. But I discovered that it's easy because it's so brilliantly written. The words are perfect, and the language is intelligent and very emotional."
5
"All choice of words is slang. It marks a class. "There is correct English: that is not slang. "I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."
5
"If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers."
5
"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
5
"I'd forgotten I'd done the anime called Spirited Away, the English version of a Japanese film."
5
"Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language."
5
"We need a president who's fluent in at least one language."
5
"You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language."
5
"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."
4
"I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out."
4
"Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear."
4
"The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment."
4
"Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it."
4
"I think maybe the English don't want to try something and look stupid, because they are a bit reserved."
4
"Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore."
4
"In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages."
4
"Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning."
4
"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."
4
"Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means."
4
"Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries."
4
"Perhaps the most striking aspect of this entire subject is that there are nonhuman primates so close to the edge of language, so willing to learn, so entirely competent in its use and inventive in its application once the language is taught. But this raises a curious question: Why are they all on the edge? Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence."
4
"Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles."
4
"My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language."
4
"We may come to Jesus and ask Him; He will know all about it; if He comes to a little child, he will adapt himself to the language and capacity of a little child."
4
"My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything."
3
"I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story."
3
"What I appreciated was the fact that the script delved into how Australians were - and still are - condescended to by the English."
3
"Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation."
3
"The London dialect as it is spoken in educated circles."
3
"Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction."
3
"Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language."
3
"Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved."
3
"Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language."
3
"Further, I'm obsessed with how language contorts and creates bodies."
3
"Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating."
3
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