Quotes About Language

Imagine you are walking in China, and all the billboards are in English. And at the restaurants, as the people are talking to you, there are live subtitles. You don't even realize you are in a computer; it's just happening.

I thought that subtitles are boring because they're there generally to serve us with information to make you understand what people are saying in a different language.

I watch Denzel Washington films with subtitles.

I didn't know that Americans don't like to watch movies with subtitles.

There are infinite shadings of light and shadows and colors... it's an extraordinarily subtle language. Figuring out how to speak that language is a lifetime job.

Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways.

You can learn the subtle language of interior style, but many people simply buy it. If you put yourself in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, you can be confident it will look good.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

There are really so many subtleties of meaning and observation that very often are not expressed by writers.

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

In much of computer science, I can easily 'auto-grade' your work and give you an instant meaningful feedback. I can't do this when it comes to the subtlety of human thought, language, poetry, philosophy.

Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.

I wish I had taken Spanish instead of French in high school. I could eavesdrop on a lot more conversations on the subway if I knew Spanish.

I lived in Paris for two years with my family. I would roam the streets of Paris during the day for a few hours in the subway, on the streets, and I listened to the French language, and I got a sense of the rhythm and the melody of the language.

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.

A knife wound heals; a wound caused by words does not

I took Spanish in high school and I didn't do too well in it. My Spanish teacher told me not to go on with Spanish anymore, so I was discouraged a little bit.

We live in different times. I would not have described London as a city of gun-toters but that was when Londoners still said sorry when you knock them over and called cappuccinos fluffy coffees & policemen, bobbies!

I think one of the biggest things that affects young women is when they hear their mothers using fat talk. It's like, "If my thin mom is calling herself fat, what does she think I am? What am I?"

Las palabras son a las cosas lo que el deseo es al objeto de deseo.

La literatura utiliza las figuras retóricas como un arma en su antagonismo con el sentido puro, con la significación abstracta que han tomado las palabras en el discurso cotidiano.

If the word is not the thing what the hell is it? Without the word you have no way of experiencing anything at all. Without the word you are not separate from whatever you are looking at or what is going on inside of you. The word is the knowledge. Without that knowledge you don't even know whether it is pain or pleasure that you experience, whether it is happiness or unhappiness, whether it is boredom or its opposite.

Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire. And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.

the physical substrate for thinking, the neural system, but the very fact that it has the form of a network implies that thought also has graph structure. This in turn suggests that language and its grammars,