Quotes About Language

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin.

Particularly significant for the future development of Guderian's military thought were the linguistic abilities he began to acquire at school. He developed excellent French and good English.

Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.

He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men. He

I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words—I was just about to leave when I met a man who seemed to know quite a lot about Schoenberg.

I said I liked Amundsen and Scott and I liked King Solomon's Mines and I liked everything by Dumas and I liked The Bad Seed and The Hound of the Baskervilles and I liked The Name of the Rose but the Italian was rather difficult.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

It was all there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language.

One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.

The mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free!

Since I'm inarticulate, I express myself with images.

How will I know I've grown up? When I've started using words I didn't really know the meaning of. I said I did that already and she said yes but I worried about it and grown-ups didn't.

All around them people were speaking a language Brown didn't understand; it was like silence with sharp edges in it.

Fate is what it was. Yes, fate that the book I had with me was a novel written by my great-grandfather, a text you couldn't read because my great-grandfather had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English, Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all the bones of any work translated into them.

I'm not lying to you," she said, shaking her head. "I really can't do it." "You can and you must," they snapped. "Those stories belong to us. It doesn't matter what language they're in, or what they're about; they belong to us. And we gave them to you without looking at them first. So now it's time to see what we've done.

I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.

I needed words, lots of words to think about while I was going about the rest of the day. And I didn't want anything affected. I wanted nothing to do with those Romance languages. I wanted clipped words, full of common sense. Thoughts to wear beneath my thoughts. Allow, express, oath, vow, dismay, matter, splash, mollify. I liked those words. I liked saying them. I still do.

have liked for him to say my name again, though. You know how it is when someone says your name really well, like it means something that makes the world a better place. In Louis Chen's case, he sometimes says my name as if it were a lesser-known word for bacon.

The only thing that disturbs us here in the village is the foreign soldiers. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, patrolling. They fight us and they try to tell us, in our own language, that they're freeing us.

including the fact that 'slut' means 'ends' or 'finished'. So my new washing machine hasn't been abusing me all this time when it stopped and flashed the word 'slut' at me in bright red lights!

English speakers' guide to learning languages, lesson #3: If in doubt, try saying the same thing again in a different accent (lesson #1 being 'say it louder' and lesson #2 being 'say it more slowly').

Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

The war in the poem between the warmth of Keatsian language and the chill of metaphysical analysis means that Stevens has not achieved a style that can embrace both the physical pine and the metaphysical pine.