Quotes About Language

y la palabra Ama, anagrama donde el poder y el amor se igualan.

El lenguaje debió nacer así, de la pasión, no de la razón.

choosing words is harder than I thought.

I work from a different theory. For everything there's a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you get along better.

Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

Names are what you can hear or see, but cannot smell or touch. I don't need a name, as name stand for things they are not, and I am what all names stand for. If you gave me a name, it would mean that we are separate, you and I, when we are not. - The Blind Girl and the Talking Moon

Learn a new language and get a new soul.

What is not pronounced tends to nonexistence.

a "story" hangs together, is treated whole. But once you tell your story into the law, it becomes the object of a precise semantic dissection. The whole of the story is of no interest; instead, patient surgeons of language wait and watch, snip and assay, looking for certain phrases, certain words. Particular locutions trip particular legal switches, and set a heavy machine in motion.

The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at the waist.

Only because our being and truth already belong to God can we avoid the nominalist temptation, where God arbitrarily and unexpectedly appears as a sheer act of will reversing creaturely being and commandeering our language miraculously from the outside such that nothing identifiably human remains of it.

She had begun to realise that these people used the English language in a way of their own. They did not ask a question in a straightforward manner but merely made an observation with a questioning inflection in their voices; they never answered a question with a plain yes or no but preferred to answer it with another question.

It's double Dutch," declared the man in the check cap. " That's what it is." " Sounds like Danish to me," said the man in evening dress. " He looks like a Dane, too." " He's a Scot," I said, laughing. " So am I. He's offering me a lift home to Scotland, and I'd give my ears to take him at his word.

Of course they all have the radio now and listen to it in their homes so they understand English—or what they are pleased to call Oxford English," said Mr. Semple with scorn. " Oxford English—that's what they call it, Mr. Kirke. Did you ever hear the like of that?

I guess she was being politically correct . . . or a weenie. Maybe that's the same thing.

My first restoration was on 'Napoleon,' trying to put the French version in with the English version, and it was most unsatisfactory.

I did read Indian scriptures when we could get the English versions, but the problem was I never took the time to learn the language. Really, what it comes down to is that I knew the emotion of faith; I knew what my parents were trying to teach me, but we always said 'No' when my mom was trying to teach us Punjabi.

One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.

In terms of graphic versus prose, I could probably do a lecture on that topic. But what stood out most was the difference in pacing the language and resulting scenes. One illustration can do so much for the reader.

When you ask someone a question, you trigger an unconscious flashback of their having been put on the spot earlier in life by a teacher, parent, or coach, and you create a syntactical 'you versus me' disconnect.

I think there is a big difference between expressing the pain and anger that many African Americans and other people of color may feel versus language that I think now crosses the line and goes into hate.

I think, for a while, there was a kind of debate about whether you could bring back Negro and reclaim it, and then it was black versus African American; now I have noticed in conversation that black people will use all three terms depending on context. I don't advocate one term.

Sometimes it's like that. I go, 'You know what? I'm going to just change scales. I'm going to even change instruments. And I'm going to go into the chromatics of the Spanish language,' and I do. You know, the poem is totally different. It's like a lunar voice versus a day voice, a solar voice.