Quotes About Language

Displacement and discreteness are two fundamental properties that distinguish human language from the communication systems of birds and other animals.

I notice that many people trust the written word more than the spoken word.

Gil and Salazar hadn't realized that the last seismometer they'd checked earlier in the afternoon on November 13 had left—in a language neither understood—a very clear message. Nevado del Ruiz had already erupted.

As I write, more and more of my cells are replaced by language. When they burn a writer's body, the smoke will be shaped llike letters.

That darkness is not the absorption of color but the absorption of language.

Cordelia glared at me. 'I expect if someone strapped you to table an swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like The Pit and the Pendulum, you'd be correcting his grammar'.

charmed the words out of

A coalescence of verbose convolution, veering on imperceptibility, impinges upon a plain proclamation an apparent profundity.

Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.

When I learned to sign and speak at the same time, the whole world opened up to me. That's the beauty of encouraging kids who are deaf to use whatever it takes to communicate.

Dinted dimpled wimpled-his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.

To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.

If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms.

There is a truth and beauty in rhetoric; but it oftener serves ill turns than good ones.

The beautiful invariably possesses a visible and a hidden beauty; and it is certain that no style is so beautiful as that which presents to the attentive reader a half-hidden meaning.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

Language is like music; we rejoice in beauty, range, and quality in both, and we are demeaned by the repetition of a few sour notes.

Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.

The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

I think that every film should have its own structure, and that's the beauty of film language - is that we get to express that deeply individualistic side of ourselves.

I'd thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she'd surpassed all the language I had for it.

khalepa ta kala, greek. It means 'beauty is harsh'.

Beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory.