Quotes About Language

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in sadness, joy, or regret. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

German wasn't good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn't interrupt.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

My goal in life is to become an adjective, Leonard said. People would go around saying, 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or, 'A little too Bankheadian for my taste.

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions. Germanic traincar constructions like, say, the happiness that attends disaster. Or: the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy. I'd like to show how intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members connects with the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights...How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before!...There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

Madeline began hearing people saying Derrida. She heard them saying Lyotard and Foucault and Deleuze and Baudrillard. That most of these people were those she instinctually disapproved of- upper-middle-class kids who wore Doc Martens and anarchist symbols- made Madeline dubious about the value of their enthusiasm.

and the magisterial presence of all those words stopped her in her tracks.

There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain. Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions...The dictionary contained every word in the English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe, purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence.

The magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks.

All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there's an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell. In any genetic history. I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in sadness, joy, or regret. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.

English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.

Én vagyok a pont egy összetett mondat végén, amely mondat hosszú-hosszú évekkel ezelÅ'tt, egy másik nyelven kezdÅ'dött, és amelyet az elejétÅ'l kell olvasni, hogy érteni lehessen a végét – azt, amikor megérkeztem én.

Derrida is my absolute god!

Emotion, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in sadness, joy, or regret. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, the happiness that attends disaster. ...most of my emotions are hybrids. But not all. Some are pure and unadulterated. Jealousy, for instance.

our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier's performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, "You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want.

I want to rip off your logic and make passionate sense to you. I want to ride in the swing of your hips. My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech.

I am reminded that while New Yorkers say standing on line, the rest of the English-speaking world says standing in line.

Recently, Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, came out against the term "billionaire," instead preferring to be called "a person of means," as though he's now ashamed of what he's built.

The question of what kind of a thing a text or poem is now becomes a function neither of what the poet might have intended by its words nor of what the conventions of grammar and meaning might seem to require of them, but rather of the reader's irreducibly subjective experience in her encounter with those words.

Colpa è una parola che lui usa per farmi tacere