Quotes About Language

El diccionario Larousse termina ahí donde empieza el corazón"...

Although she didn't know what to say. She was under the impression that she was going to have to go back and start again at zero, even relearn language. Maybe in the end all of them had been right to force her to socialize a bit, to force her to wash, dress, entertain. Her

Parler, c'est risquer d'évoquer Charlotte. Elle se cache derrière chaque mot.

Le dictionnaire est parfois pudique. Comme lui-même effrayé par la douleur.

The world ultimately is what we say it is.

Whenever you discuss politics, it is always better to use individual names rather then the term neocon.

silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.

About the only policies that can't be referred to as "deregulation" are ones that aim to reverse some other policy that has already been labeled "deregulation," which means it's important, in playing the game, to have your policy labeled "deregulation" first.

Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?

When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word "please", you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.

People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars – at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language – by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.

If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other's languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a phrase like "all power to the imagination" expresses the very quintessence of the Left.

The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will.

If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies.

When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking "three paternosters," or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.

There's a reason why, in English, the words 'politics' 'polite' and 'police' all sound the same – they're all derived from the Greek word polis, or city, the Latin equivalent of which is civitas, which also gives us 'civility,' 'civic' and a certain modern understanding of 'civilization'.

In fact, the earliest word for 'freedom' recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means 'return to mother' - because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom, cancelling all non-commercial debts and in some cases allowing those held as debt peons in their creditors' households to return home to their kin.

If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

Hoe zei jij dat ook alweer, over de wrede keuze: de woordeloosheid levend en levendig houden, of onder woorden brengen.

And then my grandfather explained -in his language- that utopias are not for mortals. And that people are like flies, that the stories they are told must be like flypaper. Utopias are gold-covered paper, he said, and flypaper is covered in everything man secretes from his body and his life. Especially the suffering. And our hope is that its measure is the measure of man, and forgiveness.

it is a journey to the language that can describe what is so hard to utter.

Los dioses enviaron desgracias a los mortales para que puedan contarlas y que en esta posibilidad la palabra encuentre su recurso infinito

Si Asaf trecea uneori prin starea aceasta, dar nu stia cum sa o descrie in cuvinte si prefera sa nici nu încerce macar, pentru ca daca exprimi ceva in cuvinte, acel lucru ramane pentru totdeauna si te urmareste ca o sentinta pronuntata impotriva ta.

More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him.