Quotes About Language

People who live on their own do tend to witter. We live without restraint, verbal at any rate.' Nigel

He was Irish, which always helped. A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't.

common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.

other. I managed to read one that said. 'What's a superego?' Written down, it looked very odd, like a sauce for spaghetti or a musical tempo mark – spiritoso, sforzando, superego. My headache was growing worse. I wished I had an Anadin (a rather poetic cry of pain). I was too tired to concentrate.

Melanie was Irish, and this made everything she said sound nice even when it wasn't.

How's this: Is it possible, do you think, to be queer when you haven't had sex in years? Or how about his one: Are words themselves a danger in the defining of community? Can we solve the problem of suffocating identity politics by allowing anyone at all to define the identities being politicized? Or would a better solution be the abandonment of politicized identities in favor of the politics of values?

A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: "Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That's all right!" He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mockingbird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.

Ah! si tu savais Ce que tes yeux me disent

Farewell is a word that, in any language, is full of sorrow. It is a word that promises nothing.

A great reader makes a great writer

It is our duty and our joy to communicate our hearts to each other. Words assist us in this task.

Hyperbole is sometimes necessary to get at the truth. (It seems odd, doesn't it, that we have to lie to tell the truth better?)

Tapi, anak-anak, tak ada penghiburan dalam kata 'selamat tinggal', bahkan jika kau mengatakannya dalam bahasa Prancis. 'Selamat tinggal' adalah kata-kata yang, dalam bahasa apa pu, penuh penderitaan. Itu kata-kata yang tak menjanjikan apa-apa.

I ask you, why is it so hard to stay away from the euphemisms? They creep in, always, and attempt to make the difficult things more pleasing.

What was the apostrophe doing there? Did the doctor own the Meescham? And what was it with exclamation marks? Did people not know what they were for? Surprise, anger, joy—that's what exclamation marks were for. They had nothing to do with who resided where.

There are twenty-six letters in all. You will learn each of them, and once you know them, you can mix them as you will, and then use them to form the words of the world and the things of the world. You can write of everything-what is and what was and what might yet be.

She liked the way the words sounded. She imagined them floating above her in a comic-strip bubble

She might be a natural-born cynic, but she knew the right word when she heard it.

Words. I had always loved them. I collected them, like I had collected pretty stones as a child. I liked to roll words over my tongue like a lump of molten honeycomb, savoring the sweetness, the crackle, the crunch. Cerulean, azure, blue. Shadowy, sombre, secret. Voluptuous, sensuous, amorous. Kiss, hiss, abyss. Some words sounded dangerous. Pagan. Tiger. Some words seemed to shine. Crystal. Glissade. Some words changed their meaning as I grew older. Ravishing.

Fairy tales have been with us for a very long time. Ever since humans invented language, we have used those sounds laden with meaning to create stories – to teach, to warn, to entertain, and to effect change upon the world. Those stories have been handed down through many generations – changing with each retelling, but still carrying within them the same wisdom and transformative power that has helped shape the human psyche.

You might say she feels in italics and thinks in capital letters!

A colleague of hers had discovered that the Biblical sentence found in John 4:7 contained all the sounds in nearly every known language.

To give children the words they need is to give them life, growth and refreshment

We are not wise enough, we adults, to know what book will be right for any child at any particular moment, but the richer the book, the more imaginative, the more emotionally true, the more beautiful the language, the better the chance that it will minister to a child's deep, inarticulate fears.