Quotes About Language

Leah looked perpetually frightened in the streets, and both she and Joseph were treated like idiots by their customers, who cared little that the hardworking pair were fluent and literate in another language.

So much of college is girls labeling other girls terrible things when they don't like their behavior, but using concerned language so they have plausible deniability is they get accused of being bitches: That girl is not cheerfully doing what the rest of us are doing, so she is probably 'depressed' or 'has an eating disorder' or 'is weird with guys,' and so on.

From now on, let's all agree that hooking up = sex. Everything else is "made out." And if you're older than twenty-eight, then just kissing someone doesn't count for crap and is not even worth mentioning. Unless you're Mormon, in which case you're going to hell.

I just sometimes get the sneaking suspicion that corporations are co-opting "girl confidence" language to rally girls into buying body wash. Be careful.

Luckily the rope fiasco was eclipsed, several weeks later, when I accidentally pronounced jalapeño with a hard j in front of Vijay, Hondo, and some other campers. I'd only ever seen it printed on the side of a can of salsa. "You think it's ja-lapeno?!" Hondo asked, incredulous. I did.

It's [the word "sorry"] the most infuriating word in the English language. Just a cheap way to behave badly then shelve responsibility by putting the onus on the other person to be forgiving.

Tants de mots han perdut el pes i el gruix que ja no goso cloure els punys amb força com abans, per por de sentir tot un món que s'esmicola.

New York City is home to so many people from so many places and the uniqueness of it is that you never feel a foreigner. English is almost hardly ever heard in the subway. In fact, it's weird.

I wouldn't use a British accent out loud, but I'd be using one in my head and it would carry over.

I cried in English, I cried in French, I cried in all the languages, because tears are the same all around the world. Esperanto.

and together we pushed through paragraphs, painstakingly sounding out the words, knitting them into human sentences that said very little.

Not everyone has to be literate, there are some great reasons for resisting language, and one of them is love.

Because we are in the same business, he didn't have to explain that "typo" is short for "typographical error." If Helena had come out, we would have had to stop using our industry lingo so that she could understand us

hacia el final, inventó una lengua nueva y desconocida, la lengua de la infelicidad, esa en la que están escritos todos los libros verdaderos.

Cum spunea Wittgenstein, nu sunt posibile miracole în lume, singurul miracol este însuÈ™i faptul c? lumea exist?.

La lengua de la infelicidad, esa en la que están escritos todos los libros verdaderos.

Lo, all maidservants are rude in their speech, When the mistress speaks it irks the servants.

And why is our music called world music? I think people are being polite. What they want to say is that it's third world music. Like they use to call us under developed countries, now it has changed to developing countries, it's much more polite.

Het gedicht, die bescheiden poging van de dichter om niet nu maar pas later uiteen te vallen.

Kakva sablasna rije?: frajle! A ipak! Koliko je dubokih tajna pokopano u toj tako vulgarnoj rije?i, koju panonski foringaši izgovaraju, skupljaju?i pri tome pljuva?ku pod jezikom ga?enja i moralnoga prezira!

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That's basic spelling that every woman ought to know.

Aggle flabble kabble . . . snurp?

A writer's place in a nation's literary history cannot be judged by whether or not he is capable of writing a book as heavy as a brick. That must rest on his contributions to the development and enrichment of that nation's language.

La belleza de la literatura reside en los malentendidos.