Quotes About Language

I answered that I was sure, and he asked me again, and this time I understood his concern. 'I'm not embarrassed!' I said, or at least tried to say, before recalling that embarazada means something entirely different to 'embarrassed' and that I'd just wailed at the doctor that I wasn't pregnant, something his medical training had presumably made evident to him.

Ich dachte, du ziehst es vor, C-Minus zu sprechen." "Das heißt C++", schalt sie ihn. "Ich weiß außerdem, dass Java mehr ist als nur Kaffee. Und Assembler nichts mit Ikea-Möbeln zu tun hat.

One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, Have a nice day.

There is a negative proof of the value of Latin No one seems to boast of not knowing it.

What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.

Al igual que la traducción, la transcripción es una forma de traición.

I hate when people say 'I see'. It doesn't mean anything and I think it's hostile. Whenever anyone tells me 'I see' I think they're really saying 'Fuck you'.

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.

They're both about the correct or proper way to do something. There is a correct and proper way to use words and there is a correct and proper way to behave with other people. And I behaved improperly with John and feel bad, so I compensate by obsessing with language, which is easier to control than behavior.

Odio quando qualcuno dice «Capisco». Non significa nulla ed è vagamente aggressivo. Ogni volta che lo sento in realtà mi suona come un «Vaffanculo».

Credo che nel mio cervello ci sia una specie di setaccio che impedisce un rapido (e tanto meno simultaneo) travaso dei pensieri in parole. Un po' come il filtro nello scarico della vasca da bagno; c'è qualcosa che trattiene i miei pensieri nel cervello, e così bisogna cavarli a forza, come quegli schifosi grovigli di capelli bagnati.

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought.

C'è un modo corretto di usare le parole e c'è un modo corretto di comportarsi con gli altri. […] le parole sono più facili da controllare rispetto ai comportamenti. […] Credo che sia questo a farmi paura: la casualità di tutto. Persone che per te potrebbero essere importanti, ti passano accanto e se ne vanno. E tu fai altrettanto. Come si fa a saperlo?

Las traducciones son meras aproximaciones subjetivas. Y eso es todo lo que experimento respecto a cuanto digo: no es lo que estoy pensando sino lo máximo que puedo aproximarme a lo que pienso por medio del lenguaje, con sus defectuosas y constrictivas reducciones. Y por eso a menudo pienso que es mejor no decir nada que expresarme de una manera inexacta.

She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

In their westward march across present-day Nebraska and the Dakotas during the early nineteenth century, the Lakotas gradually allied themselves with the Cheyennes and the Arapahos, who had been pushed onto the northern plains in advance of the Lakotas and had already forged an enduring bond, albeit an odd coupling. Their languages were mutually unintelligible, an impediment they overcame with a sophisticated sign language, and their characters could not have been more dissimilar.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

I am not impressed by big words,' said my uncle, who was always ready enough to bandy 'predestination' and 'infralapsarianism.

The feeling for words comes at an early age--or rather it is lost in most cases at any early age, leaving the rest poets" (170).

The real reason that language so often carries magic is because humans have trouble not ascribing special power to it. Language makes so many things happen. If we say or write words in a certain way, we can make people see things that aren't there and feel things they have no reason to feel—all this with mere mouth sounds or paper marks.

The real reason that language so often carries magic is because humans have trouble not ascribing special power to it.

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

Is not literature meant to speak of our being a thousand different kinds of things, at times creating even this diversity? If literature gives up this purpose, this duty, it renounces all claim to legitimacy. I am Hungarian. I am Slovene. I am Serbian. You do not need literature for sentences like that. A bureaucrat will do, and a rubber stamp. A border guard. An Army.

Bollocks! Bollocks, bollocks.