Quotes About Language

The word isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists

The guttural eruptions and long flowing vowels rolled just beneath my comprehension like a beautiful brook. I gazed into this brook for long spells of time. It was not wide, just one man's voice, but it was as deep as the universe.

Language is the gateway to the human world. (...) Language is far older than civilization. (...) The fact that it is possible to teach apes to ride bicycles, but impossible to teach them to talk, suggests that it is the use of language rather than the use of tools which is the essential characteristic of humanity. The word, not the sword or the spade, is the power that has created human culture.

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me'.

Kids had made fun of him in elementary school because his father wanted him to be literate, not just functionally literate, or 'iconerate,' the new term for those who went through life using only symbols and key words for written communication.

Submitting to the rules that govern language and the forms of social interaction is not a natural process, although we all do it.

A satisfação depende de pegar o que se quer, em vez de esperar pelo que é justo receber. Tudo isto entra na linguagem cotidiana que liga sexo à agressão...

a meat cleaver of a vocabulary when it comes to describing people. In the Tarahumara tongue, humans come in only two forms: there are Rarámuri, who run from trouble, and chabochis, who cause it.

Know why people run marathons? he told Dr. Bramble. Because running is rooted in our collective imagination, and our imagination is rooted in running. Language, art, science; space shuttles, Starry Night, intravascular surgery; they all had their roots in our ability to run. Running was the superpower that made us human—which means it's a superpower all humans possess.

De alguna manera, entre ellos descubrieron cómo cortar la grasa sin sacrificar nada del sabor de mi prosa.

Sabe por qué la gente corre maratones?», le dijo al doctor Bramble. Porque correr se encuentra arraigado en nuestra imaginación colectiva, y nuestra imaginación se halla arraigada en correr. El lenguaje, el arte, la ciencia; los transbordadores espaciales, La noche estrellada de Van Gogh, la cirugía intravascular; todo tiene su origen en nuestra capacidad para correr.

It's wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.

It's wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.

That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.

The plural of spouse is spice.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it

Always be sure to never speak in absolutes.

The guy did the thing like a bad simile.

Art is innovation, and its history cannot be written except from a distance sufficiently great to perceive form and form-ratio. One might answer that art today is still an incessant violation of codes. But how are those violations legible if no one code ever settles into common use, that is, starts to behave like a language or another convention-based system for getting things done; like a style, in other words? There can be no artistic innovation unless someone else is not innovating.

For every word has its marrow in the English tongue for order and for delight.

For EARTH which is an intelligence hath a voice and a propensity to speak in all her parts.

When you "spell" a word correctly, you are in effect casting a spell, charging these abstract, arbitrary symbols with meaning and power.

It is gaol that finally reveals to me the beauty of Shakespeare, the spirit in his words, the jaw-dropping audacity of his language.