Quotes About Language

Although this explains the mysterious way Meloux seemed to have known he was coming, Cork still understands that the old Mide has a gift for such forewarnings. Meloux once explained it as a communication with nature that Cork himself could nurture if he was so inclined. "It is not a secret language," the Mide had said. "You need to quiet all the other voices in your head and listen.

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

He yearned for the words. It was an affliction, this constant clutching for words. It felt as if he had been excluded from a conversation.

I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.

Words penetrated the tank from the outer room. They were tantalizing, like those ghosts of meaning in a great symphonyhinting that the composer had caught a glimpse of something notes could only vaguely convey and words could never even approach.

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

[A]s if it were not the masterful will which subjugates the forces of nature to be the genii of the lamp... that forces a life-thought into a pregnant word or phrase, and sends it ringing through the ages!

I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language," Hunter wrote. "I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.

What is a crow but a dove dipped in pitch? And what is a man but a dog cursed with words?

At these moments sufferers desperately want to escape from their holes, the silence and loneliness, and return to the world we share with others… At these moments, language, the means of expression we are most comfortable with, becomes truly therapeutic – a form of medicine that has the power to relieve our suffering

individual thought is mostly the result of collective thought and of interaction with other people. The language is entirely collective, and most of the thoughts in it are. Everybody does his own thing to those thoughts – he makes a contribution. But very few change them very much.

culture – the collectively shared meaning

An orgy of words, after all, is still an orgy.

Don't you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

The species greatest harvest ? words.

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.

When modern culture tries to replace sin with ideas like error or insensitivity, or tires to banish words like "virtue", "character", "evil" and "vice altogether, that doesn't make life any less moral; it just means we have obscured the inescapable moral core of life with shallow language.

When modern culture tries to replace sin with ideas like error or insensitivity, or tries to banish words like "virtue", "character", "evil" and "vice altogether, that doesn't make life any less moral; it just means we have obscured the inescapable moral core of life with shallow language.

When modern culture tries to replace sin with ideas like error or insensitivity, or tries to banish words like "virtue", "character", "evil" and "vice" altogether, that doesn't make life any less moral; it just means we have obscured the inescapable moral core of life with shallow language.

We had to redefine our musical culture. Not only our musical culture, however: at the end of the sixties all German artists had the same problems. Writers, directors, painters … all of them had to invent a new language.

Song references are like emotional shortcuts and social acronyms.

Darwinians have always owed their readers a translation manual that would "cash" the teleological language which Darwinians avail themselves of without restraint in explaining particular adaptations, into the non-teleological language which their own theory of adaptation requires. But they have never paid, or even tried to pay, this debt.

Nor have any Darwinians ever given, to this day, any such reconciliation of their theory with the teleological language which they employ as freely as though they were disciples, not of Darwin, but of Paley. Presumably