Quotes About Language

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication--but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and gutteral signaling.

Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations.

A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.

No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment.

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One's fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.

There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love…. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.

I don't study literature, I read it for enjoyment

Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers...

Grammar school never taught me anything about grammar.

Diplomasi adalah mengatakan hal yang paling buruk dengan cara yang paling manis.

Movements are as eloquent as words.

The more I say the more remains to be said … as soon as I speak it becomes quite clear that, no matter how long I speak, new chasms open. No matter what I say I always have to leave three dots at the end. Whatever description I give always opens the doors to something further, something even darker, perhaps, but certainly something which is in principle incapable of being reduced to precise, clear, verifiable, objective prose.

We will leap tall couplets in a single bound

Unique feelings are so unique that they can not be popularized. Feelings without words in the dictionary disappear. Every year thousands of feelings disappear for lack of a concrete form.

No word is capable of carrying the impulses one wants to send with it

Le poète dilate les voyelles.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.

There is no language without deceit.

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.