Quotes About Language

The sound of the words as they're said is always different from the sound they make when they're heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside

In wondered in avenging was being used as an adjective or a verb.

I think we all feel it, to varying degrees. Perhaps in some other language there is a word for the world is terribly wrong. That feeling of stun and unbelief and abandonment and shock and horror and distress.

if anyone ever uses lol with me, i rip my computer right out off the wall and smash it over the nearest head. i mean, it's not like anyone's laughing loud about the things they lol.

The words were clumsy in my mouth, like typing with hammers.

Man kann Worte schenken, aber nicht wegnehmen. Und wenn Worte geschenkt und empfangen werden, dann sind sie etwas Gemeinsames.

I have never lived anywhere but New York or New England, but there are times when I'm talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Southern truncation, and I know it's because I'm swimming in your cadences, that you permeate my very language.

O som das palavras quando são ditas é sempre diferente do som que fazem ao serem ouvidas, porque o falante ouve parte do som do lado de dentro.

Appropriate. The word is a well-dressed cage, used to capture the truth and hang it in a room that no one ventures into.

Danny curses up a storm. And feels stupid. Because cursing in front of company at least generates an effect. Cursing alone is like taking a Hi-Liter to futility.

She is sitting right next to me. I want to run my finger along her arm. I want to kiss her neck. I want to whisper the truth in her ear. But instead I watch as she conjugates verbs. I listen as the air is filled with a foreign language, spoken in haphazard bursts. I try to sketch her in my notebook, but I am not an artist, and all that comes out are the wrong shapes, the wrong lines. I cannot hold onto anything that's her.

Insight, n.: How telling that there isn't anything called "outsight," as if language itself knows the direction that wisdom must come from. — David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

the common Greek term for "slave," andrapodon, "man-footed creature," was built on the foundation of a common term for cattle, namely, tetrapodon, "four-footed creature.

What?' he said. I'm sure he heard me perfectly well, but like most deaf people he's got in the habit of saying 'what?' automatically to every conversational gambit - I notice myself doing it sometimes.

Cambiando de postura en el sillín, Adam pensó que la forma en que su humilde vida seguía los moldes de la literatura tenía algo como de metempsicosis. ¿O quizá -se preguntó, hurgándose la nariz- era consecuencia de estudiar tan detenidamente las estructuras de las frases de los novelistas ingleses? Uno se había resignado a no tener ya un lenguaje privado, pero se aferraba melancólicamente a la ilusión de poseer los hechos de su vida.

When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it's almost like a crime. A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it's not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it's not going to translate. It's going to lose.

I scoffed at such old fashioned notions as duty, patriotism, the military virtues. And here I was, aged fifty, standing on guard at the very edge of the known world. To protect what? A hundred or so mud and wattle huts, three hundred savage strangers who do not even speak my tongue. And, of course, my own skin.

technological breakthroughs, such as the Internet, have made international communications not just possible but commonplace. However, for most Americans, these international conversations are viable only if the other side speaks English. In this new international era, Americans find themselves locked in a monolingual society. How strange that, instead of viewing those who speak other languages as welcome assets to our nation, some seem eager to erase linguistic diversity.

Writing comes out of the rift between what we have experienced and the language we've been given to express it. We write to bridge this divide, to find word adequate to our sense of reality... Creative writing is the search for and creation of a language that will express what the writer unconsciously knows but does not yet have a language to express.

Here's the second joke: Two psychiatrists meet on the street and say hello. "How are you?" asks one. "Eh, not so good," says the other. "I had a stupid misunderstanding, a slip of the tongue. I was visiting my mother out at the old folks' home. We were having lunch and I asked her to pass me the salt, but instead I said, 'You fucking bitch you ruined my life.

There's a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus "Leave me the fuck alone" comes out as "Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point.

It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

In Japanese and Italian, the response to [How are you?] is I'm fine, and you? In German it's answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by Not so good.

In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, 'Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl'.