Quotes About Language

creo más en el verbo que en la acción pero no se me juzgue por lo que digo sino por lo que dejo de decir

Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.

We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. 'Writing and print and the computer,' writes Walter Ong, 'are all ways of technologizing the word'; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.

When we speak with emoji, we're speaking a language that machines can understand.

Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.

Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.19

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I Zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski

Translation is a tricky business," Holmes observed, placing the tips of his fingers together in his accustomed fashion. "Cervantes once said that reading something in translation is like looking at a Flemish tapestry wrong side out. The image may be there, but is obscured by a great many dangling threads.

with the exception of Chinese, even the languages that originated writing, and so made the earliest use of it, have dropped their original system, and borrowed another

In truth, Derrida has always been preoccupied (in the strongest senses of that word) by what precedes or exceeds language.

There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes between what a text says (or what an author wants to say, or thinks s/he is saying) and what a text does.

Deconstruction wouldn't make much sense without the structures that are subject to destructuring.

A text always remains in crucial ways 'imperceptible'.

Everyday life would be impossible without metalanguage. But the notion of metalanguage entails a logic of the supplement. There is something 'maddening' about the notion: metalanguage is, in short, both necessary and impossible. We cannot do without it, but there is no metalanguage as a discrete language: it is both part of and not part of its so-called object language.

Derrida encourages us to be especially wary of the notion of the centre. We cannot get by without a concept of the centre, perhaps, but if one were looking for a single 'central idea' for Derrida's work it might be that of decentring.

Differance brings together the two notions of differing and deferring.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.

There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape.... The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

There is no good word for stomach ; just as there is no good word for girlfriend . Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover , and as abdomen is to consort , and as middle is to petite amie .