Quotes About Language

Words do not necessarily work, it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say.

Ma in una cosa è identica a sua madre: che salvo rare eccezioni, quando parla dice solo ovvietà - tutto quel repertorio di frasi fatte e idee usate che riempie le pattumiere della saggezza contemporanea. [...] Ahi, ahi, povera Rachel…proprio non ne poteva fare a meno. La mia unica figlia stava al mondo da ventinove anni e non era mai riuscita a produrre una frase originale, con un qualcosa di totalmente e irriducibilmente suo.

Non è cosa da poco dover ricominciare la propria vita a cinquantasette anni; e quando un uomo non dispone di altre carte che il cervello che ha nella testa e la lingua che ha nella bocca, deve pensarci bene prima di decidersi ad aprire quella bocca e parlare.

The impediment to the building of Babel—that man must fill the earth—would be eliminated. At that moment it would again be possible for the whole earth to be of one language and one speech. And if that were to happen, paradise could not be far behind.

te encontraste cayendo por la fisura entre el mundo y la palabra, el abismo que separa la existencia humana de nuestra capacidad de entender o expresar la verdad de la vida, y por motivos que te siguen desconcertando, aquella súbita caída por el aire vacío y sin límites te inundó de una sensación de libertad y felicidad.

Life can last just so long, you understand. Everything else is in the room, with darkness, with God's language, with screams. Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on.

It's just that we shared a certain language, and when she talked to me about her past, I understood her without having to ask for explanations.

Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other

isn't it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language, and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say that language---the ability to experience the world through symbols---is in some sense a physical property of human beings, which proves that the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn't it? Adieu, Descartes. The mind and body are one.

È un lento ma ineluttabile processo di erosione. Le parole di solito hanno una durata leggermente più lunga delle cose, ma alla fine anch'esse decadono insieme con le rappresentazioni che un tempo evocavano.

He wants to say. That is to say, he means. As in the French, 'vouloir dire,' which means, literally, to want to say, but which means, in fact, to mean. He means to say what he wants. He wants to say what he means. He says what he wants to mean. He means what he says.

Your daddy doesn't know his assonance from his elegy! And he calls himself a poet.

Jaguar model names sound like rockets: XJ–S, XJ8, E–Type. Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight.

I can think of a more despicable word than 'nigger'", I volunteered. […] "Like what?" "Like any word that ends in –ess: Negress. Jewess. Poetess. Actress. Adultress. Factchecktress. I'd rather be called 'nigger' than 'giantess' any day of the week.

Strictly dickly Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Austerus verpa.

When I was ten, I spent a long night burrowed under my comforter, cuddled up with Funshine Bear, who, filled with a foamy enigmatic sense of language and a Bloomian dogmatism, was the most literary of the Care Bears and my harshest critic.

instead of simply saying, "A rabbi, a priest, and a black guy walk into a bar," he'd say, "The subjects of this joke are three males, two of whom are clergymen, one of the Jewish faith, the other an ordained Catholic minister. The religion of the African-American respondent is undetermined, as is his educational level. The setting for the joke is a licensed establishment where alcohol is served. No, wait. It's a plane.

jalapeño peppers snapped in half and ground into our lips for saying "fuck

Based on the ideas of the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, this is the view that language doesn't just change minds by transferring thoughts from one head to another; it configures how people make sense of the world, including about space, time, and causality.

If you write "judgement" you should also write "colour" and "tyre.

To stand in the shadow of the scar up in the air. To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing. Unrecognized, for you alone. With all there is room for in that, even without language.

The poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.

They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.

Go blind now, today: eternity also is full of eyes - in them drowns what helped images down the way they came, in them fades what took you out of language, lifted you out with a gesture which you allowed to happen like the dance of the words made of autumn and silk and nothingness.