Quotes About Language

A yawning repetitiveness as of a man who knows few words but will not stop talking.

The beast is dry and mottled, shedding skin as minutes drop from life, a wristy piece of dogged ugliness, its labors meant to carve from language beauty, that beauty which lifts free of flesh to find itself in print

The soul needs something extra, a place outside matter where it can stand. The Bible—think of it as the primer of a language whereby we can talk to one another about what matters to us most. It is our starting point, not the end point.

The assurance from the dictionary had melted in the night.

Since well before the Kung's engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men--some more fluently than others.

In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: 'Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.

What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

The trick to learning Chinese is to always carry the flashcards into work every time, and also to write Chinese letters to your children.

Foo Kyu' is just a very unfortunate cultural coincidence. Just think about his poor son, 'Foo Kyu Two.'

because if there was one thing he didn't like it was big words, they just lied and covered things up, those big words, they didn't let what really was live and breathe but just carried it off into something that wanted to be big, that's what he thought...

To compose poetry is about listening, ...not to contrive, it is, so to speak, about bringing forth something that already exists-this is why when one reads great poetry, when often gets this 'I-new-all-of-this-already, I-just-didn't-express-it' feeling. Language listens to itself.

it's almost like a language, because every language gives you access to its share of reality, and the different religions are different languages that can each have its truth, and its lack of truth, I think and it's foolish to think that God is anything defined, anything you can say something about...

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

I heard Yiddish when my father's family came to the house, which was as seldom as my mother could arrange it.

He was feeling totally lost, leaving his family and country for a place where he knew nobody and didn't even speak the language.

When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.

I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.

Both of my parents are professors and everyone in my family has some fabulous degree of something or another and I couldn't get into college because I didn't know a language.

In humans, the family prevents infanticide. Next to language, the core family, consisting of a mother, a father and children, is the greatest difference between us and other primates.

In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.

Speaking more than one language and living in a multicultural family and environment did not seem like anything but what it was: the world I lived in.

I want you to know how I feel about my Italian heritage so I'd like to say a few words in Italian: Verdi Pavarotti DiMaggio Valentino De Niro Giuliani. . .

Lie detection is like language there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families.