Quotes About Language

expresado se instala en el aire y es difícil hacerlo retroceder.

Welcome to the world of translation—a compromised world of half-rights and half-wrongs.

Translation has been used, and should be used, to resist or redirect colonial or postcolonial power.

Translation has been used to oppress to ways in which it has been or can be used to fight oppression, to liberate minds and bodies.

Translation theorized as a purely technical and linguistic matter, concerned with the transfer of meanings from one language to another, not associated with political issues of domination,submission, assimilation and resistance.

When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. In the emerging highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It's really that simple: Program, or be programmed.

Talking successfully about feelings requires you to be scrupulous about taking the judgments, attributions, and statements of blame out of what you are saying, and putting the statement of feeling in. It is crucial to look at the actual words you are using to see whether those words really convey what you want them to. For

Peanuts aren't nuts. Whales aren't fish. Tomatoes aren't vegetables. And attributions, judgments, and accusations aren't feelings.

Aquello que verdaderamente se es, está situado en una realidad carente de significado concreto, averbal, intransferible y alejada de constructos tales como el espacio y el tiempo.

I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you

no whisper mars the utter silence of the untranslated stars.

Having words and explanations for things is too modern

since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you

Because of his unusual way of handling language, Cummings had to travel a long road from the time his early books were ridiculed for their eccentricity to the point at which, with Robert Frost, he was one of the two most popular poets in America.

When I was very young, I was suitably impressed to learn that, appearances notwithstanding, the whale is not a fish. Nowadays these questions of classification move me less; and it does not worry me unduly when I am assured that history is not a science. This terminological question is an eccentricity of the English language. In every other European language, the equivalent word to 'science' includes history without hesitation.

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.

What Disneyland proposes is a technique of abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses, a mindless thrill, like an electric shock, that insists at the same time on the recipient's rich psychic relation to his country's history and language and literature. In a forthcoming time of highly governed masses in an overpopulated world, this technique may be extremely useful both as a substitute for education and, eventually, as a substitute for experience.

I want all the books on the shelves. I want the books with dinosaur words like nigger that show the skeletons in our national closet. I want books with the word cunt as well as the word kike. Words don't scare me. Suppressing them does.

Since language is the only tool with which writers can reflect and shape a culture, it must be transformed into art. Language is not a limitation on the art of literature; it is a glorification. It has been the scaffolding inside which nations and philosophies have been built, and the language of literature has added the ornamental pediment by which the culture is remembered.

Always use good grammar. It's like wearing designer clothing. People may not like your style, but they will pay attention to the cut of your cloth.

Love will heal What language fails to know

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.

This is what language is: a habitual grief. A turn of speech for the everyday and ordinary abrasion of losses such as this: which hurts just enough to be a scar And heals just enough to be a nation.