Quotes About Language

Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception.

I believe devoutly in the Word. The Word can save all destroy all stop the inevitable and express the inexpressible.

Everything that you say can influence a person; so choose your words carefully.

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

Boys use the word Friendship to begin the relationship, and girls use the same word to end the relationship. Same word, defined with a different attitude.

Kindness is a language the blind can see and the deaf can hear.

Kindness is a Language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

I love you in a language that I don't fully understand. In words that I haven't found enough courage to forklift out of my chest.

Love birds never separate and they say birds of a feather flock together. Even animals and birds know the language of love. Love is all abounding and romance is a beautiful part of it.

The Eskimos have 52 words for snow because it is so special to them; there ought to be as many for love.

That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.

I could not find the words that would reach him. Perhaps there were none.

Patroclo. —Aquiles no apretujó las sílabas de mi nombre como solía hacer la gente, que las apelotonaba todas juntas, como si quisiera liberarse del nombre. En vez de eso, hizo resonarlas todas. Pa-tro-clo.

When I was born, the word for what I was did not exist

In Phthia, the consonants were harder than elsewhere, and the vowels wider. It had sounded ugly to me, until I heard Achilles speak.

Quella parola, "ninfa", misurava l'estensione e l'ampiezza del nostro futuro. Nella nostra lingua significava non solo "dea", ma "sposa".

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way…We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.

20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.

Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me." As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

I know what I want is impossible. If I can make my language flat enough, exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, like washing a stone over and over again in river water, if I can find the right perch or crevice from which to record everything, if I can give myself enough white space, maybe I could do it. I could tell you this story while walking out of this story. I could—it all could—just disappear.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. We ought to, but we don't—or at least, we don't quite as readily. But the more you do, the more quickly you can recognize the feeling when it comes around again, and hopefully you won't need to stare as long.

Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty