Quotes About Language

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.

Satriani's Law: There's at least a 30% chance that someone will print the name Satriani incorrectly

Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.

Mathematics is human reason itself in a form everyone can recognise. Why should poetry, reason and religion not be higher forms of Mathematics? All that is needed is a grammar of their common language.

And Rose knows that dictionaries will never be the same again. Dictionaries will be forever imbued, sanctified, significant, suggestive. They will not be just themselves, but this moment, these moments, being here, like this, in this place, her and him, in this now. She will always have this now, tethered to Collins and Chambers and the Shorter Oxford.

When in a foreign country, he thought, you are behind a fence, or in a cell - everything is going on around you but you are not quite part of it. You open your mouth, and you sound like a child; you know that you are someone else, but you cannot explain it.

I control the world so long as I can name it.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. Later, I made an inventory of the room – a naming of parts: bed, chair, table, picture, vase, cupboard, window, curtain. Curtain. And I breathed again.

That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely

That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.

Charlotte misses her books. Her familiar walls, lined with language.

Laszlo's histrionics, which induce pursed lips and heavy silences in Lisa or in Sylvia, have been for me the breath of alien other worlds; they evoke the tumultuous unfettered society of Eastern Europe - languages I do not speak, cities I do not know, saints and tyrants and forests and vampires, a past that is more myth than history and all the better for it.

Dolores seems to dwell only just inside language, she makes sentences the way a potter works clay, squashing them any which way into shapes that please her.

In the beginning was the Word,' says the Gospel of John. But the truth is, words came later. In the beginning was the rose.

The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.

The Orkney islands and the Shetlands were in fact not surrendered to Scotland until the latter half of the sixteenth century, and Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English.

The Normans also gave to the English the concept of the inherited surname that came to define a unified family and its property.

The English language is filled with Scandinavian words such as 'sky' and 'die', 'anger' and 'skin' and 'wing', 'law' and 'birth', 'bread' and 'eggs'.

Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English.

The argot that came to be used in the courts was known as 'Law French'. 'Master' and 'servant' come from the French. 'Crime' and 'treason' and 'felony' are French, as are 'money' and 'payment'. The

I had been privy to some of her intense sensory images, to her telescopic memory, to Genocide flashbacks. This was how she told me about her past. I think it was the only way she knew to speak to me about something she wanted to say, but couldn't say in any other language to a young boy, her eldest grandson.

Most easily recognisable is the word raj (king) which is cognate with the Irish rí and this word is demonstrated also in the Continental Celtic rix and the Latin rex. Most Indo-European languages, at one time, used this concept. However, the Germanic group developed another word, i.e. cyning, koenig and king.

The danger is that executives will become contemptuous of information and stimulus that cannot be reduced to computer logic and computer language. Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event). The tremendous amount of computer information may thus shut out access to reality.