Quotes About Language

When you do not understand the language being spoken, you have two options. You can struggle against the isolation, or you can give yourself up to it.

God, don't they teach you how to spell these days? No, I answer. They teach us to use spell-check.

He thought of the grammar of Gaelic, in which you did not say you were in love withsomeone, but that you "had love toward" her, as if itwere a physical thing you could present and hold—a bundle of tulips, a golden ring, a parcel of tenderness.

In our world, Darija said, throwing aside the chapter she was marking up, there will be no semicolons.

The weapons a writer has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example.I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers. What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too.

This was why there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that just didn't have words big enough to describe them.

When we were little, Eric and Fitz and I invented a language. I've forgotten most of it, with the exception of a few words: valyango, which meant pirate; palapala, which meant rain; and ruskifer, which had no translation to English but described the dimpled bottom of a woven basket, all the reeds coming together to form one joint spot, and that we sometimes used to explain our friendship.

It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don't like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn't speak that language. They didn't learn it as children and they didn't manage to pick it up as adults, either.

I like the word 'evil'. Scramble it a little and you will get 'vile' and 'live'. 'Good', on the other hand, is just a command to 'go do'.

Over the years, he's learned empathy the way I might learn Greek, translating an image or situation in the clearinghouse of his mind and trying to attach the appropriate sentiment to it, but never really fluent in the language.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed.. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers. What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too.

It was Mark Twain who noticed that, in German, the noun for fish is masculine, the one for fish scales is feminine, and the word for fishwife is neuter. These are the thoughts that go through

Waste cilake, Sioux for I love you

sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them. My

different readers. What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet?

But it is exactly because I was a writer that I could never do it. The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers. What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet?

I'm very sorry - the only words that could not rework into anything but what they signified.

If you ask me, music is the language of memories.

This time I don't bother with words; the ones we need don't exist in the English language. Even the syllable grief feels like a cliff, and we've fallen.

True confession? The reason we don't talk about race is because we do not speak a common language.

It's because you don't just tell stories," Darija explained. "You paint with words.

This is why there was music. There were some feelings that just didn't have words big enough to describe them.

She found out that you could do a lot of editing with three words, if they were yes, no, and shit.

Poetry is like a beef bouillon cube; it's hardly ever needed (or perhaps never needed at all); it sits in its precious wrapper, well out of view, until everyone has forgotten it's there.