Quotes About Language

He died in St. Vincent's. I got a call one night, and this very firm Negro voice said, 'Your dad, he ain't got no life signs.' I said, 'You mean he's dead?' 'We ain't 'lowed to use that word,' said the voice. 'He ain't got no life signs is all.' " 'That's okay,' I said. "He never did.'

one hallmark of intellect is the ability to simplify, to make the complex easy to understand. Anyone can be unclear. The way to credibility is to speak and write plainly without language that bewilders or misleads.

Special effects aside, we'll write clearer, cleaner, and more energetic sentences if we fill them with nouns, verbs, and adverbs rather than with prepositions and prepositional phrases.

Obviously, we can't cut all prepositions, nor should we try. But keeping them to a minimum offers a quick route to clarity, simplicity, and brevity.

Sometimes intensifiers such as very are simply inflationary—a way of exclaiming instead of explaining: Original: The funds for the multilingual program are necessary given how very diverse the district is. Better: Funding the multilingual program is necessary given the district's diversity. Best: Funding the multilingual program is necessary because the district's students speak more than a dozen languages.

This wasn't the France I knew, which had always been as much about swimming in the sea as about anything else, about languorous holiday sunshine and whole days spent drinking wine and staring up at the clouds. No, this country seemed to be offering something dark and strange and new to me, in an entirely different language. If only I could learn to understand it.

Yes. Big as the moon over Gotham City. And every psychopath, sociopath, sadist, alcoholic, narcissist piece of shit anywhere can see it and comes running. And when the two find each other, they click. They recognize each other on some deep level. It's like they speak two variations of the same language.

Nature demands our respect, Anna. It has a brutal side for sure, but if you can learn its language, there's peace to be found, and comfort too. The best kind of medicine I know.

Finnegans Wake, several

He turned the page. He said, This is writing. This is printing. This tells us of all the things we ought to know in the world.

O pai d Delfina disse não à assimilação, sem saber que a libertação da pátria seria na língua dos brancos e sem imaginar ainda que os filhos dos assimilados iriam assumir o protagonismo da História.

Tears are words that need to be written.

Nadie enseña lenguaje a otro. El lenguaje es una invención humana que se hacesocialmente y nadie enseña, todos adquieren el lenguaje, crean el lenguaje. Lo que uno enseña al otro es la gramática. Hasta la Sintaxis en ciertas dimensiones tampoco se enseña, porque la sintaxis de tu análisis es la forma como el pensar se estructura en el discurso.

Language is being used to make social inequality invisible.

Daí que, à linguagem da possibilidade, que comporta a utopia como sonho possível, prefiram o discurso neoliberal, pragmático

Cuál es la diferencia entre un guion y una novela? La una es un relato cuya principal herramienta es la palabra, y el otro basa su impacto en las imágenes sin prescindir de la palabra, por eso hay guiones a los que se les califica de muy literarios, porque los personajes hablan mucho.

Woman, the sweetest name That man can breathe, or flattering language frame, Who art thou?

big things are best said, are almost always said, in small words.

it is harder to decide what you want to say than it is to figure out how to say it.

You must be able to say the sentences you write. And so they cannot be long and serpentine things that curl around clauses, caress subclauses, encompass extended metaphor, stop briefly for a whimsical digression and culminate, ultimately, in a long and rhythmic peroration that signals to your audience that you would not take it unkindly if they, at just about this moment, would interrupt you with vigorous and sustained applause.

They weren't trying to self-consciously fashion a phrase that would grab the listener. They were simply trying to capture in words the essence of the thought they wished to communicate.

The words and phrases you use must not only be "hearable" by the audience, they must be

A great speech is literature.

I think it is very sad that 'sitcom' has become a pejorative term.