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Language Quotes
"One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'"
3
"Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us."
3
"French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic."
3
"I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried."
3
"I am not 100% English, I am actually part Italian and even part Hungarian. Therefore I feel very much part of Europe both in my upbringing and outlook."
3
"The thing is, in English I'm able to write the lyrics as I'm making the song, once I'm done with the melody."
3
"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."
3
"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
3
"All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth."
3
"A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it."
3
"English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite."
3
"A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state."
3
"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."
3
"I like to play with someone who can cover a lot of ground and someone with whom you can discuss the language at a reasonable level; otherwise it gets a bit frustrating."
3
"All I know is that I operate by going out to each of them and trying to learn the territory in which they operate. My language to each of them has to suit their brain."
3
"To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up."
3
"I haven't spoken English with native speakers in several months. I've been speaking Arabic."
3
"French is, in many ways, more difficult for an English-speaking person to sing. It is so full of complex and trying vowels. It requires the utmost subtlety."
3
"The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation."
3
"I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life."
3
"Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence."
3
"The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!"
3
"I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language."
3
"Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
3
"How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem."
3
"Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood willone day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy?"
3
"Though language forms the preacher, 'Tis good works make the man."
3
"Its language is as bare as a monk's cell, and as uninviting."
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