Quotes About Language

The main thing is, the constraints have come off style. What we are saying now is that the Revolution does not proceed in a pitiless, forward direction, its politics and its language becoming ever more gross and simplistic: the Revolution is always flexible, subtle, elegant.

There's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

You know what you meant. I only know what you said.

Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride's lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.

In his spare moments he is studying to improve his Greek. Old Bishop Fisher was in his seventies when he began the language, and he is not to be bested by a dead prelate. In a year or two, he wishes to be able to join the divines in their subtle dissection of each point of translation

There are codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line, or in a syllable, or in a pause, a caesura.

Of course I have had to rearrange the text a bit— bugger about with it, as Hébert would say.

But the nation's business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches.

It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation. "Whom

Southwark whores bawling out their prices like butchers selling dead flesh.

Metaphors are good,' he said. 'I like metaphors. Metaphors don't kill people.

He was terribly afraid that happiness might be a habit, or a quality knitted into the temperament, or it might be something you learn when you're a child, a kind of language harder than Latin or Greek, that you should have a grasp on by the time you're seven. What if you haven't got that grasp? What if you're in some way happiness-stupid, happiness-blind?

There are codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line, or in a syllable, or in a pause. . .

Very helpful, I must say. Look at them in the eye and shout, and they understand every word..." (Mr. Warbeck in Sienna, talking about local Italians.)

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

Although I drank little, I smoked about twenty cigarettes a day, and when I played mahjong all night long, as I sometimes did, I smoked fifty or more. I did not have much to do with the other Japanese in Hankow, and for that reason I was soon able to speak Chinese pretty well.

Shamal is a Kurdish name

We worked and governed with incredible elan. We really ruled. For the bureaucrats of the Ministry the contrast to the Weimar Republic was stark. Party chatter in the Reichstag was no longer heard. The language of the bureaucracy was rid of the paralyzing formula: technically right but politically impossible.

Mine . The language of love is like that, possessive. That should be the first warning that it's not going to encourage anyone's betterment.

This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.

Now that I've started touching her, I can't seem to stop. Like somehow the language of my hands will tell her all the things I don't know how to say out loud.