Quotes About Language

My father always insisted that Persians basically did not have a home, except in their literature, especially their poetry. This country, our country, he would say, has been attacked and invaded numerous times, and each time, when Persians had lost their sense of their own history, culture and language, they found their poets as the true guardians of their true home." - Foreword by Azar Nafisi

How not to sound like a upper class man. It had been mostly a matter, I'd found, of speaking not far back in the throat but up behind the teeth, a reversal of the way I'd just painstakingly learned to speak French like a Frenchman

Eine Beleidigung ist ein Zitat aus der Vergangenheit. Ihre Bedeutung hat sie nur deshalb, weil sie von unzähligen Sprechern wiederholt worden ist.

Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display.

Americans do seem to say things which make the English notice England.

Because there's so much that just can't be said plainly. Try describing what beauty is - plainly - and you'll see what I mean.

I tried to explain: 'Well, once you stop believing in an old gentleman with a beard...It's only the word God, you know – it makes such a conventional noise.' 'It's merely a shorthand for where we come from, where we're going, and what it's all about.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

Shit is universal no matter which language.

At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

He said, The word for moonlight is moonlight.

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

People weren't saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from this.

All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction.

If Greek and Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain.

I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.

A word is also a picture of a word.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

The alphabet is male and female. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. This is why they will hide the order. If you will know the combinations, you make all life and death.

He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inferences of fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated.

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total hold, ease and alleviate, before he put on clothes and entered the complex boxes where people do their living. Nothing fits the body so well as water.