Quotes About Language

The real subject of On Being Blue is language itself, which he sees as glorious to the exact degree that it is also inadequate, unable to sustain an immediate relation between a word on the one hand and its arbitrary and yet indissoluble referent on the other. All words are figurative; no blue is ever just blue.

The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

The purpose of an imaginative narrative isn't to confirm what we think we already know about reality; rather, it offers "a record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of language." A fictional cat may reflect qualities of a real cat, but it is better appreciated as a product of the author's agile mind.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between.

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

Words are the only things that last forever; they are more durable than the eternal hills

Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains, but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman.

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.

Linguists had long known that Latin script—the everyday alphabet of today's Western world—evolved from Greek letters, which had themselves derived from Phoenician, as did Hebrew.6

This combination of papyrus and a vowel-and-consonant alphabet allowed, for the first time in human history, the potential for mass literacy.

Schmandt-Besserat's work caused a stir mainly because it seemed to contradict the "pictographic theory," that writing evolved directly from pictures—a theory that is still taught to schoolchildren. Her "token hypothesis" was so bold and so different from the pictographic theory that it could not help but evoke controversy.14

The older pictographic theory still has some virtues. First proposed by William Warburton, an Anglican cleric who eventually became bishop of Gloucester and who wrote in the 1730s, it was, and probably remains, the most commonly accepted theory about the origins of writing.

The scribe was no mere linguistic technician, but rather the sole possessor of the skill set that made civilization hum, a sort of investment banker, engineer, and diplomat all rolled up into one. Or, in the words of the linguist Ignaz Gelb, "Writing exists only in a civilization, and a civilization cannot exist without writing."47

George Bernard Shaw's famous spelling of "fish" as "ghoti"—the first two letters pronounced as the last two in "tough," the middle letter as in "women," and the last two as in "nation.

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

Our common language is ... English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

Vigorous writing is concise.

You don't have to speak much if you speak well," Meloux replied.