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Language Quotes
"We must have a better word than "prefabricated" why not "ready-made"?"
20
"There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely."
19
"One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation."
19
"Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies."
19
"Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters."
19
"Language is not an abstract construction of the learned or of dictionary-makers but is something arising out of the work needs ties joys affections tastes of long generations of humanity and has its bases broad and low close to the ground."
19
"Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing."
19
"I don't think Australians ever use a couple of words when twenty will do just fine."
18
"Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression, they exist where a word has never intruded."
18
"English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing."
18
"Language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset..."
18
"Because words have deep meaning, Tweets have power."
18
"I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word."
17
"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances."
17
"Every word is a prejudice."
17
"Words to intrigue, inspire, examine, question, praise; Words to help us appreciate our world, our selves, our games; Words to dance our true soul fires gracefully free."
17
"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
17
"Perfect grammar--persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it."
17
"He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out."
17
"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
17
"German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it's almost like a meeting."
16
"The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries."
16
"A cliche is everything you've ever heard of."
16
"Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects."
16
"Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes;It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music."
16
"Language has time as its element, all other media have space as their element."
16
"Senator, we just don't use that kind of language on the floor of the Senate."
15
"The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words."
15
"It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought."
15
"The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss."
15
"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
15
"I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name."
15
"The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat."
15
"Aye, aye, that's the way wi' thee: thee allays makes a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's."
15
"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about, you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about."
15
"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."
15
"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."
15
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