Quotes About Language

But dammit, words mean what they mean, even if everyone thinks they ought to mean something else.

How are you going to talk to someone who has no idea?" Grimm said, nodding. "How can you explain something you can't find words for? How can you get someone else to understand something for which they have no frame of reference?

metaphors can only take you for a short walk on a tight leash.

Writing writhed across the surface of the stone, runes that looked a little familiar. Norse, maybe? Some of them looked more like Egyptian. They seemed to take something from several different sources, leaving them unreadable.

But I'd never been very good at expressing myself verbally.

I thought God gave everyone free will," I said. "Which presumably—and evidently—includes the freedom to be incorrect when translating one language into another.

Then I drew in a breath, and my renewed will with it, lifted the rod in my right hand, murmured a phrase in a language I didn't know, and blew the tires off his fucking truck.

There are a few things everyone should know about Newfoundland. First and foremost is how to pronounce it correctly.

I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes." Philip Dusenberry

My heart must open to the cosmos with no langauage unless we invent it moment by moment in order to breathe.

I find it impossible not to believe that there's something in Irish blood that favors their power with words.

The language I wanted from him did not exist in his world.

He did recall that the summer after graduating from college before he joined the state police he had read Shakespeare. It was the pure language that stupefied him. He would be in a diner reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and his acquaintances were confident he was studying for some test. The test turned out to be the nature of his mind. Shakespeare seemed even truer than history. Literature was against the abyss while history wallowed in it.

I have such trouble, getting all these manuscripts every year by the hundreds, and galleys and so on, because you can tell right away if a person's not in touch; if they want sincerity, or to be right, it's hopeless. If there isn't a primary intoxication with language and playfulness of their own consciousness, it's hopeless. If they just want to be right, well then they'd be better off being a professor, wouldn't they?

The word he used was coup, and I'm not speaking French just to arouse you.

I'll always be a word man, better than a bird man

What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.

Vocabulary and coherent sentences can't be downloaded onto paper unless they've first been uploaded to the head by reading

Martin Luther King Jr., the nation's apostle of nonviolence, once said, "A riot is the language of the unheard."32 But King also showed us that, ultimately, only disciplined, sacrificial, and nonviolent social movements can change things.

Se ninguém entende ninguém, e ninguém nunca entenderá nada, jamis; esta é a prática verdade.

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language

As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from "a broken home." They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.