Quotes About Language

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

The Hebrew language will go from the synagogue to the house of study, and from the house of study to the school, and from the school it will come into the home and... become a living language

Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.

You use metaphor to make yourself feel at home in the world. You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown. The problem is the unknown is where I want to be.

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

I have found the game to be, in all factualness, a universal language wherever I traveled at home or abroad.

I think because I was brought up in a Christian home, I was kind of careful not to swear in my lyrics.

I am told that the first comprehensible word I uttered as a child was 'home.

With languages, you are at home anywhere

Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

Thierry had no idea why they were called French doors. His native countrymen weren't stupid enough to put them in their homes.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

I learned Spanish at home and, since half my family doesn't speak English, it's my first language.

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.

Language achieves soul only when it's applied as a tool, used by those who imbue it with what they have had the courage and honesty to perceive and feel.

When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.

I hope the terms of Excellency, Honor, Worship, Esquire, forever disappear from among us... I wish that of Mr. would follow them.

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.

I am, I hope, never offensive by accident.