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Language Quotes
"I don't think Australians ever use a couple of words when twenty will do just fine."
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"Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals."
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"Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."
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"Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape."
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"It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters."
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"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."
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"No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another."
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"The joy of knowing a foreign language is inexpressible. I find it really difficult to express such joy in my mother tongue."
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"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."
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"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
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"It is ironic that the only thing separating 'friend' from 'fiend' - is a single letter."
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"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
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"But language is wine upon his lips."
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"Jeez, Hazel," Percy said, "tell your horse to watch his language."Hazel tried not to laugh. "What did he say?""With the cussing removed? He said he can get us to the top."Frank looked incredulous. "I thought the horse couldn't fly!"This time Arion whinnied so angrily, even Hazel could guess he was cursing."Dude," Percy told the horse, "I've gotten suspended for saying less than that..."
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"What's the point of using words nobody knows or can say comfortably?"
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"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."
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"I want to hear you wound my lovely language with your rough barbarian tongue."
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"She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else."
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"In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. this is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the word or in this case, makes a mess of it. It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you're in trouble and maybe that there's a cover-up."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Most of the people who have verbally asserted that 'there is no master of pronounciation' have intentionally made a claim and unintentionally made their claim believable. (It is 'pro-nun-ciation' not 'pro-noun-ciation'.)"
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"Wordsare powerfulforces of nature.they are destruction.they are nourishment. they are flesh. they are water.they are flowers and bone.they burn. they cleansethey erase. they etch. they can eitherleave youfeelinghomelessor brimmingwith home."
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"I am no poet. I do not love words for the sake of words. I love words for what they can accomplish. Similarly, I am no arithmetician. Numbers that speak only of numbers are of little interest to me."
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"In Sanskrit, there exists no word for 'The Individual' (L'Individu). En GrA ce antique, il n'y avait aucun mot pour dire 'Devoir' (Duty). In French, the word for 'Wife' is the same as the word for 'Woman.' En anglais, nous n'avons aucun mot semblable A l'exquise 'Jouissance!"
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"English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing."
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"'Good English' is whatever educated people talk so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another."
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"Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage."
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"No language is rude that can boast polite writers."
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"The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence."
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"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."
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"Language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset..."
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"One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least."
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"Putting it into words will destroy any meaning."
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"The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar."
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"Where do the words gowhen we have said them?"
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"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love."
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"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."
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