Quotes About Language

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

No skill is more crucial to the future of a child than literacy.

As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning and meaningful statements lose precision

So that her stubborn passion for the One—as if, in this miniscule grain of dust, she had conquered the Universe and closed herself off to everything else—is immediately enlarged, as if she felt that all things were speaking a new language, with the voice of the beloved's life—with everything close to her heart down to the last of the beasts of the field.

The inability to hear is a nuisance; the inability to communicate is the tragedy.

In sign, you more often than not start a story with the punch line. It's the telling that is important.

If the students didn't understand the charade, I'd turn and write on the blackboard, but I tried to avoid even that. I didn't want the students automatically translating everything from sign to English—that slowed the process.

And then she made a sign that sent a chill up my spine. It was a slang sign meaning "I'm deaf," but it's crudely done, made by putting the thumb in the ear and turning the rest of the hand downward—almost as if the hand is a donkey's ears.

What's interesting about the studies is that prelingually deaf people (people such as my parents, who were born deaf or who lost their hearing early on) have no interior monologue.

In most of us there is a tiny voice we consult as part of our thought processes. Deaf people literally don't hear themselves thinking.

to leave a child without language for a moment longer than is absolutely necessary seems cruel to me.

Tell Doris Jean I figure it's about time I learned that sign language,

And there is also a camp of compromise—those who favor "total communication," or signing while speaking in full sentences.

The oralists believe in speaking and lipreading without ever signing; and the manualists are pro-signing in American Sign Language (ASL).

American Sign Language—ASL—is a language unto itself, with its own syntax and grammar. Adjectives follow nouns, as in Romance languages.

By the age of two, hearing children perceived their parents' deafness well enough to know automatically that they must use gestures with their parents and other deaf people. If the children talked at all, their voices had an unusual quality and they exaggerated their mouth movements. These same children immediately shifted gears, speaking in "normal" voices, with hearing people.

Like virtually all schools for the deaf at that time, the Indiana State School emphasized oral skills: speaking and lipreading.

We were speaking in feelings. Words were not enough.

That was another thing hearing people did—made too-large movements. It was tantamount to shouting.)

Music is the greatest communication in the world. Even if people don't understand the language that you're singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

We'll talk to them in Spanish and if they don't understand us, we'll say it louder and slower, and shake our heads because how stupid can you be not to be able to speak such a simple language.

Language was not given to man: he seized it.

No further use now for this language, this learning, this whole education through which I was taught to exert myself at the heart of the world. Mirage or mirror, a great enchantment glows in this darkness and leans against the door-jam of ravages in the classic pose assumed by death immediately after shedding her shroud. O my image of bone, here I am: let everything finally decompose in the palace of illusions and silence.