Quotes About Language

develop the 100 word vocabulary taught to the Lao tribesman to make the rudiments of combat conversation. A few nouns, some basic single tense verbs, names of weapons and directions made up the pidgin English. Like spice, flavor was added by whichever additional words the Special Forces teacher felt appropriate. The basic word denoting the reproductive act, and its many wondrous and colorful variations, was by far the most popular and common.

grunts don't sing, they grunt. That's why they're called grunts.

it is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly.

It's a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.

Metaphor is a way of knowing the world, and no less a one than other sorts of ways of gaining knowledge.

Poetry exists to find words for what resists easy naming; we are most often driven to write it or read it when any other sort of language seems incapable of the work required.

Unspeakable"--unspeakability?--comes in three varieties. First, that which cannot be said because one does not know it, and therefore cannot say it. Second, that which cannot be spoken because it is culturally impermissible to do so. And third, that which cannot be named because it is impossible, since the language provides no terms, no words to enable articulation.

It thrills me that I don't know why; the fact that poems do things they should not be able to do, through means not fully apprehensible--well, it makes me treasure them all the harder.

Perhaps in time, Ella, the words we have lost will fade, and we will all stop summoning them by habit, only to stamp them out like unwanted toadstools when they appear. Perhaps they will eventually disappear altogether, and the accompanying halts and stammers as well: those troublesome, maddening pauses that at present invade and punctuate through caesura all manner of discourse. Trying so desperately we all are, to be ever so careful.

Love one another, push the perimeter of this glorious language. Lastly, please show proper courtesy; open not your neighbor's mail.

I suggested, further, that the following might be sculpted: a large box filled with sixty moonshine jugs--piled high, toppling over, corks popping, liquor flowing. Disorder to match the clutter and chaos of our marvelous language. Words upon words, piled high, toppling over, thoughts popping, correspondence and conversation overflowing.

Love one another, push the perimeter of this glorious language.

What Proust is describing is an act of self-discovery on the part of his reader. Immersing herself in Proust, the reader may encounter aspects of herself that, while they have perhaps been in existence for a long time, have remained unnamed, undescribed, and therefore in a certain sense unknown. One might say that the reader learns the language of herself

Language, a great poem in and of itself, is all around us. We live in the lap of enormous wonder, but how rarely do most of us look up and smile in gratitude and pleasure?

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that the limits of one's language were the limits of one's world. By coming up with fresh and arresting words to describe the world accurately, the writer expands the boundaries of her world, and possibly her readers' world, too. Real writing can do what R. P. Blackmur said it could: add to the stock of available reality. There

The reader learns the language of herself; she is humanly enhanced, enlarging the previously constricting circle that made up the border of what she's been... her consciousness has been expanded.

Reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.

Words lose their meaning when you look at them too long. 'God.' 'Science.' Meaning.

Language is intrinsically political, as how we talk about something conditions how we think about it,

Are we rich?" "We're comfortable." He sometimes said things like that instead of yes or no. That's how lawyers answer questions.

Research by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA shows that when people put words to their emotions—"afraid," "angry"—the amygdala, that little biological threat sensor that can throw the brain into animal mode, cools down almost instantly. At the same time, another part of the brain—part of the prefrontal cortex, which is the "smart" area of the brain—goes to work.

Metaphors are lies.

Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.

I don't like quotes, I prefer quotations