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Language Quotes
"As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen."
33
"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."
33
"Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries."
33
"Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words."
33
"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."
32
"The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition."
32
"Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used."
32
"Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past."
32
"It was all completely incomprehensible to me. I was fearful of the language. You had to look up every third word."
32
"Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things."
32
"It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language."
32
"Its language is as bare as a monk's cell, and as uninviting."
31
"I had said no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him and no to him about his saucy language. It had never gotten to this level until I came back."
31
"Numbers constitute the only universal language."
31
"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."
31
"I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language."
31
"When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language."
31
"Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I'd gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were 'stressed out."
31
"They had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands, the air was heav'y with th'em&."
31
"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."
31
"The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back."
31
"More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor."
31
"These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages."
31
"If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."
30
"The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment."
30
"Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification."
30
"To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery."
30
"No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it."
30
"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!"
30
"Further, I'm obsessed with how language contorts and creates bodies."
29
"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
29
"Grace, if you have used an iron within the last six months, I will eat that fork,' Ms. Chancellor says.'Which one?' I try to tease. 'You've got a lot of forks to choose from.''From which to choose, Grace. Do not end your sentences in prepositions, dear.''Of course, I totally see what you're getting at. I mean, at what you're getting."
29
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