Quotes About Language

In the poems of . . . Robinson Jeffers, it is a style of consciousness rather than of language we see most in an altered light, some shadowed corner of experience newly illumined and made perceptible by words.

have little to offer in this time when nothing lasts, only that desire to which you come as to a well. Even the language tells it: to satisfy and sadness rooted on one stock, the faithful breathing back towards shadow of everything that once bent to the sun. And still, the long slanting days pull us in, the warmth, the pitch of the hills, and everything in us wants to give over again— Only a little further, a hand's extending, a single word; the mirage, beautiful, beckons us on.

an Arabic word – algebra? It comes from the Arabic al-jabr and it means the reunion of broken parts. I like that, 'the reunion of broken parts': it's poetic, don't you think?

After a day of watching the two-legs interact from within their midst, she was certain that they could talk as well as any wolf. Unlike wolves, however, they mostly used their mouths, a thing she found limiting. How could you tell someone to keep away from your food when your own mouth was full?

words used wrong are like poison.

As crianças são estancadas na frente dos seus aparelhos digitais e televisões enquanto os pais fazem o jantar, as tarefas domésticas ou trabalham em casa. As crianças podem aprender a música de um personagem de desenho ou reconhecer letras e números, mas, ao contrário do que muitos pais acreditam, elas não aprendem linguagem assistindo TV.

French-English

If toes had eyes, then I could see how my feet know where to go, but toes are blind. And how is it that my tongue speaks words it cannot hear? Because for all its eloquence, the tongue itself is deaf, and flaps in soundlessness.

Lips move; lips touch; lips signal. Lips are on the outside for show, and on the most secret inside of your mouth. Lips frame words that lie. Lips frame a hole that wants to be filled.

I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

I think of the irony that in our language [Nepali] the word for love can also mean deceit.

Shit is another useful word. Also very common. For example, pleasantly surprised? You say 'No shit?' You think someone tells you tales, you scoff 'You're shitting me.' You find something you like very much, you exclaim 'That's good shit!

Food, like language, is always in motion, propelled by the same events that fill our history books. Wars, advances in science and technology, and shifting patterns of migration and commerce are continuously shaping and reshaping the foods that sustain us.

Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to luminous chaos. Loving the power of grammar and the fine distinctions of language, I seek the part of the mind I didn't know was there, the part 'sheer,' 'no-manfathomed,' 'cliffs of fall.

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.

Conversation is the wall we build between ourselves and other people, too often with tired words like used and broken bottles which, catching the sunlight as they lie embedded in the wall, are mistaken for jewels.

we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'...

Ug-g-Ug. Ohhh Ohh g. Ugg.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water. — Janet Frame, Faces in the Water . (The Women's Press Ltd December 31, 1985)

No word is absolutely wrong or dirty or insulting. It all depends upon context and intention.

Foot," she said in a matching torrent of Jannisetti curses, "Heel. Sole. Toes, with green toenail polish!

Tocohl frowned, and saw Kejesli suddenly for what he was. He was a man trying not to be Sheveschkem, without conscious knowledge of what being Sheveschkem actually entailed. He spoke GalLing' but danced Sheveschkem; he wore worlds' motley, but lowered his ceiling.

Old writers never die, they just decom-prose!

Don't just read words,' he would tell her as he held up the latest story, 'devour them. Let the words create new worlds.