Quotes About Language

English] fails me utterly when I attempt to describe what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world postmodernist.

I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. ?????? ?? ????. Beauty is harsh. ? Donna Tartt, The Secret History

I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. ?????? ?? ????. Beauty is harsh.

hubris on Henry's, too much Greek prose composition—whatever

The other day, I tried to remember what was the word for 'dragonfly' and couldn't.

If I thought my kid was a bastard I would sure the fuck name him something else.

In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possibly support the structural order he attempts to impose.

The most satisfying of languages, Latin.

In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know the language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.

One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.

Penso che in questo caso dovremmo chiamarla ironia della sorte, più che divina provvidenza. Sì, ma perché vuoi darle un nome? E se fossero la stessa cosa?

Psychology is a terrible a word.

You couldn't beat him away from Greek with a stick.

Looks and language of hatred are not very pretty at any time, but in the atmosphere of death they acquire a character of horror.

We need to reclaim that word. And pussy, too. Why is calling someone a pussy equal to calling them weak? Pussies can take any penis you throw at them, pump out babies, and last a lifetime without needing erectile dysfunction pills. They're tough and resilient and provide pleasure for those who own them and those who want to use them. We need to take pussy back. It should be a compliment. Someone is brave or strong, they should be called a pussy.

The older names of flowers involved a similar degree of awareness; we might guess at the qualities of plants called hound's piss and goodnight-at-noon, but it took real intimacy to name a flower courtship-and-matrimony: its sweet scent fades after picking.

The Greek word for "rooster" is built from combined parts that mean "getter out of bed".

The very conventions of poetry were devised to encode experience, to make it less obvious and thereby more true. To make a metaphor, after all, is to describe something in terms of what it is not , the better to apprehend what it is .

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.

W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?

All words are possible, then, all names. They rain down, all these words, they disintegrate into a powdery avalanche. Belched from the volcano's mouth, they spurt in to the sky, then fall again. In the quivering air, like gelatine, the sounds trace their bubble paths. Can you imagine that?

I don't know. Sometimes I try to say what's on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I'm shitting pages. Sorry

There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for this treachery.