Quotes About Language

The influence of William Shakespeare on the English language and literature can hardly be exaggerated. His life spanned A.D. 1564 to 1616 and he made a name for himself as a poet and playwright. Creating such memorable works as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, he has become the most-quoted author of the English-speaking world. Because of this, many of the words and phrases he used or coined are still in use today. His plays are still studied and performed.

Spoken of' community (more exactly: a community speaking of itself) is a contradiction in terms.

I'd heard that they were going to stop teaching cursive in schools, which was fine with me, because then all us old people would have a secret code.

Jesus!" "Are you hurt?" "Jesus!" "Walk down the hallway and come back when you have more vocabulary.

Dog's ears went up at the word "ham": they say dogs have a vocabulary of about twenty words, and I was pretty sure that seventeen of Dog's were ham.

In my limited experience, women dreaded male statements that ended with "then you've got another think coming." It usually meant there was a lot more coming, but in this case there wasn't.

They have a saying, the Basque. That just because the cat has kittens in the oven, it doesn't make them biscuits.

You know the difference between an asshole and an anus?" He spoke from the side of his mouth. "What's that?" "An anus can't say 'that went well.

Look . . ." I dreaded female statements that started with "look." In my limited experience, there was nowhere to hide after they were made.

Words are important, no matter what the language—they are perhaps one of the most powerful things we have. Words can preserve life or invoke death and should be handled with the same care as any deadly weapon.

You can now say the word shit on television." "Even broadcast television?" "There is no more broadcast television, Boss." I thought about the TV set back at my cabin that I hadn't turned on in a long while. "I wondered why mine had stopped working.

Henry spoke to Dog. "Hinananjin." Dog went over and sat beside him. It had already been established that the furry brute was conversant in Cheyenne, Shoshone, Arapaho, Crow, and Lakota; English was the language he chose to sometimes ignore.

During World War II, while the Americans used Navajo Indians speaking their native language for radio communications, the Japanese used speakers of the Kagoshima dialect to keep communications secret. To me, it sounded like

Words. Words had the power of exactly, precisely nothing. Hand grenades blow shit up. They meant something when they landed next to you. Words meant someone was talking, nothing more.

I collect words and lock them away, stored like a hoard of gems.

In Shakespeare's time only about .8 percent of the world's population could speak English; today about 20 percent can. Shakespeare was lucky: a rising tide lifted his posthumous boat.

We speak in Spanish when we make love. English seems an impossible language for intimacy.

Jan-Peter offered to teach me the language of Amsterdam's red light district. ...But after his first phrase--'Using the back door will cost you double'--I withdrew my request.

There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. Everyone equal. No one higher or lower than anyone else. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person.

English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it.

And they spoke so fast!

Pátzcuaro and in the shops that catered to them, and we couldn't read the signs above the storefronts as we passed them, so we peered in every window along the way to see what was inside.

Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. Everyone equal. No one higher or lower than anyone else. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person.

But my dad had argued that he didn't know the language of cars. To him, everything had its own language—the language of breakfast, the language of business, the language of politics, and on and on. In Spanish he knew all the languages, but for as long as he'd been speaking English, he believed he knew it only in certain realms.