Quotes About Language

The Portuguese and Hebrew words had been finished here and there with high, distinctive arches that sloped backward over the letters they adorned: the roofs of the Portuguese letters sloping to the left, those of the occasional Hebrew verse to the right, the long unbroken lines proceeding down the page like successive rows of cresting waves approaching a shore, one after another, dizzying.

Language is surely too small a vessel to contain these emotions of mind and body that have somehow awakened a response in the spirit.

NOTICIARIO DE UN COLEGIAL MELANCÓLICO NOMINATIVO: la nieve GENITIVO: de la nieve DATIVO: a o para la nieve ACUSATIVO: a la nieve VOCATIVO: ¡oh la nieve! ABLATIVO: con la nieve de la nieve en la nieve por la nieve sin la nieve sobre la nieve tras la nieve La luna tras la nieve Y estos pronombres personales extraviados por el río y esta conjugación tristísima perdida entre los árboles BUSTER KEATON

Las palabras abren puertas sobre el mar.

Discourse about God is unique and cannot be compared to any other human language. It is irreducible to any other discourse.

El Ser es hablante antes que pensante.

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

We don't call them inmates,' Molly said, quoting one of the psychiatrists.'We call them patients.

When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so inadequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.

I said what might have been a bad word meaning excrement, but I hope that I used a polite synonym.

Grandpa Teddy often said, "In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.

Words are plastic these days. Small loans made to desperate people at exorbitant interest rates are called payday advances. A cheesy hotel paired with a seedy casino is called a resort. Any assemblage of frenetic images, bad music, and incoherent plot is called a major motion picture.

Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world...

Lem searched for the words to convey what he felt. As he found the language to describe what the dog had meant to him, his chest grew tight with emotion.

apparatus for speech.

He could make many sounds, but none were words.

There. I'd actually said it. I had told her she was beautiful, even though she might need a translator to have my meaning properly conveyed.

And if words existed before matter of any kind, before suns and worlds and seas and human beings and fortune-tellers…well, then an alphabet must have existed even earlier, so that words could be formed. Therefore letters are more fundamental and powerful than anything else a diviner could use to force the secrets of the universe into view.

Maybe it's just that before anything came the word, and words are the roots of everything that our senses perceive. Nothing can be imagined, nothing can be visualized in our minds, until we have a word for it. Therefore, when I give myself to the free flow of any words that trip off my tongue without predetermination, I am tapping into the primal creative power at the heart of the cosmos.

My father used to say that someone who used foul language was someone who needed to study vocabulary because there were more civilized ways to get one's point across.

Japan's foreign policy must have teeth, and, if Japan does not have the fangs, it must acquire them. If the only language that tomorrow's Asia will understand comes from the barrel of a gun, Japan must relearn that language

The passions may be terrible, but the syllables are a relief.

Where would you be without etymology'? Lea asked sarcastically. 'I think I might find words a little less interesting,' said Mr Ruche.

it is 1958 and men don't really have words for feelings