top of page
.png){kind=small}
Language Quotes
"The alphabet is where all our secrets begin."
1
"In its proper role, a number counts the missing words."
1
"Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence."
1
"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."
"I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do god and devil combine to form a live dog?"
"Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals."
"In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English."
"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."
"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."
"Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling."
"We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word."
"The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries."
"The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words."
"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."
"English is not merely a language anymore, it has become a way of life for millions of non-native English speakers around the world."
"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."
"English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing."
"Every word is a prejudice."
"No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that's one of its functions - so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it."
"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."
"Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage."
"No language is rude that can boast polite writers."
"No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another."
"Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies."
"Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects."
"The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence."
"So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure."
"And why does he talk so funny? Doesn't he mean squashed tomatoes?I don't think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that's just how they talk then."
"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."
"Language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset..."
"One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least."
"'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word."
"English is the language through which I reach hearts from various corners of the world. English is the language through which I flirt with my species. English is the language through which I make my species think."
bottom of page