Quotes About Language

Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.

I have woken up to find that I am made of words.

There is something talismanic about familiar words.

Because before you acquired language, you didn't exist.

That spark of new creation, the new phrase that genuinely surprises, the act that bears the impress of a live consciousness: these are astonishingly rare. Human beings are everywhere overcome by rituals and dead language, by threadbare notions about what is real.

Sucede que a veces en el matrimonio las palabras se gastan, que a fuerza de repetirlas van vaciándose lentamente, perdiendo su sentido. No hay caso en volver a emplearlas, el significado de ellas ya no dice lo que semánticamente debiera decir. La pareja puede ser una instancia involuntaria de pérdida de lenguaje.

I never dreamed that one day it would be one of my favorite everyday words. Fuck this, fucking that, don't give a fuck. I love it. It's perfect for emphasis!

The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of regions that long antedate the Italian nation, regions that until 1861 were part of sovereign and usually hostile states, sharing few cultural traditions and no common spoken language

The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. Without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth. This

It was a lot to convey with a look, but sometimes words murdered ideas. He

So we spent our undergraduate years awash in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and Middle English, living with Beowulf and Sir Gawain, ... and we were required to pay hardly any attention to the 19th-century novel, and not much to the 18th. As for the 20th century, it might have never arrived. As a friend of mine said, 'They taught us to believe in dragons.

Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin.

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Like water leaking slowly through a dike to become a steady trickle or a flood, words and ideas inexorably elude the censor's grasp. (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)

But for the most part, women are not educated as they should be, I mean those of quality; oft their education is only to dance, sing and fiddle, to write complemental letters, to read romances, to speak some languages that are not their native...their parents take more care of their feet than their head, more of their words than their reason.

My parents are very funny when they have to deal with anything racy or off-color. They usually pretend they don't speak English.

she too lives in and for words, for the words of others. Other men's flowers. 'These are other men's flowers, only the string that binds them is my own.

Here in the Black Country they call good food 'bostin' fittle'. Fittle means vittles. Good vittles, bostin' fittle. They have their own language here. It hasn't been knocked out of them yet.

The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

Vane diventano le parole ripetute troppe volte.

There is nothing more valuable than the printed word.

Eventually you will get into the habit of enjoying line as a language all of its own.