Quotes About Language

Nehru is good with words, he studied at Harrow and Trinity College. Let us see how the pandit uses the colonizer's language against them, Somnath says.

Fuck)! Jim cried, and certainly it felt like a generative word. It felt like he was using it correctly for the first time, like saying Jesus! when you saw Him in a piece of blackened toast, or Oh my God! when a bush in your backyard happened spontaneously to burst into flame.

She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey.

Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English...?

What's he like?" "Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate." "These are English words for ugly.

It was beautiful, and that is a word I would not need to explain to the girls from back home, and I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language. The waves still smashed against the beach, furious and irresistible. But me, I watched all of those children smiling and dancing and splashing one another in salt water and bright sunlight, and I laughed and laughed and laughed until the sound of the sea was drowned.

This was always my trouble when I was learning to speak your language. Every word can defend itself. Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so the understanding closes on empty air. I admire you people. You are like sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as your money.

lips, excused from their color, had formed words relieved of their sound.

The Americans were tall men on full rations and it clearly made no sense to them that exhaustion should have the last word in the common language of English. "How come?" Mary heard them yelling to each other, over the noise of the engines. "How come they just left it broken like this?

One time he showed me a picture of the band. It was the picture from the CD box. One of the musicians in the picture, he had a lot of hair. It was black with tight curls and it sat on the top of his head like a heavy weight and it went right down the back of his neck to his shoulders. I understand fashion in your language, but this hair did not look like fashion, I am telling you, it looked like a punishment.

You have to be mad in the language you're mad in.

There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.

Actually, it's a new word—one I invented and wrote down with my frindle!

If two witches were watching two watches, which witch would watch which watch?

The past tense of "921 is

What?" said Kyle. "How can a number have a past tense?

And isn't every letter a love letter?

leaves the body, transcends himself, herself, outside any system of belief. Freedom equals panic because without belief there is no language when you've lost yourself to empathy, a total shut down is the only way back in.

Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence.

Jerome described her as a waitress-translator, and Sylvie wondered why the women always have these hyphenated jobs? The men are all philosophers, artists, filmmakers." Kraus, Chris. Torpor (S.182)

I like to dip into other people's books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own. (...) It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill—getting larger 'cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.

Qui parle, et pourquoi, voilà la seule question.

The right word at the right time helps you make sense of the world. It helps, but sometimes not a lot.

That's the beauty of the text, I find. You can key in things you would never say, and it hardly hurts a bit.