Quotes About Language

English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets.

You speak with warm marbles in your mouth. You have an Indian accent

I couldn't bear to have yet another French speaker guffawing at my name, so when the man on the phone asked, "Can I 'ave your name?" I said, "I am who I am." Half an hour later two pizzas arrived for "Ian Hoolihan".

To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language.

English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, its shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar—the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine — and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When

I wish I could convey the perfection... But language founders in such seas

Humankind, with its long history, is by now a corpse bound to a tree with the ropes of convention. If the ropes were cut, the corpse would simply fall to the ground. Prayer in one's mother tongue is a manifestation of that pathetic state. -from A Prayer in the Mother Tongue

Ich fand nirgendwo so viel Kindheit wie in der Deutschen Sprache. Schmatzen, schnaufen, schluchzen, schlürfen: Viele deutsche Wörter klingen wie Onomatopoesie. Für die Neugeborenen klingt vielleicht jede Sprache so wie Deutsch für mich.

Consiousness sticks language onto existence, papering over existential facts that stick out awkwardly; or it attached words to such objects like ropes whereby it can drag and fling them about as it pleases.

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language.

That girl,' tutted Alsana as her front door slammed, 'swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time.

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.

Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over irie, was that it sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings. Like the first morning of Eden and the day after apocalypse. A blank page. (p.332)

I am from the Kilburn branch of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, said Hifan proudly. Irie inhaled. Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, repeated Millat, impressed. That's a wicked name. It's got a wicked kung-fu arse sound to it. Irie frowned. KEVIN? We are aware, said Hifan solemnly, pointing to the spot underneath the cupped flame where the initials were minutely embroidered, that we have an acronym problem.

Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals.

The experience of listening to an hour's music you barely know in a dead language you do not understand is a strange falling and rising experience. For minutes at a time you are walking deep into it, you seem to understand. Then, without knowing how or when exactly, you discover you have wandered away, bored or tired from the effort, and now you are nowhere near the music.

Archie says -Science- the same way he says -Modern-, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them.

It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love.

But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes.

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.