Quotes About Language

Words can be turned into spears. They can be turned into prayers. It's a strange world that you are in. But you deal with words.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to pr

The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.

The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.

Even in the deepest love relationship - when lovers say 'I love you' to each other - we don't really know what we're saying, because language isn't equal to the complexity of human emotions.

On the whole I prefer cats to women because cats seldom if ever use the word 'relationship'.

The Eskimos have hundreds of word for snow but we've invented three times that many words for relationships. What really defines a relationship?

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

En realidad, muy de acuerdo con nuestra tradición mental, en la cual las palabras no sirven para nombrar las cosas sino para disfrazarlas, liberal y conservador no eran palabras que denotaran una filosofía, sino etiquetas que diferenciaban a los mismos protagonistas en distintos momentos de la rebatiña.

Hermanados por la tradición y por la lengua, tal vez no esté muy lejos el día en que se cumpla el todavía improbable sueño de una unidad de naciones de nuestra América

Uno de los principales desvelos de los colombianos fue siempre la búsqueda de la corrección en el lenguaje. A ello se debe la vaga fama de hablar el mejor español en el continente, que más bien revela una larga persistencia del modelo colonial, una enorme resistencia a la incorporción de aportes originales, una fijación en el culto de la metrópoli y la entronización de lo castizo como canon inapelable.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

Good writing is rhythm.

Well, specifically, Mrs. MacNeil, she advised me to keep my goddamn fingers away from her cunt.

she and Ben chattered away to each other in the language of mothers with their toddlers; the two understood every word exchanged, while the rest of the world just listened, smiled, and didn't understand a single word of the happy gibberish.

Standard English usage is to use the male pronoun when talking about someone whose gender is not known," Gwendolyn said. "When you avoid pronouns altogether, you really mean 'she.

Good English, well spoken and written, will open more doors than a college degree. Bad English will slam doors you didn't even know existed.

The eighth verse of Genesis 1 reads: "And God called the expanse heaven." Rashi here endeavors to explain the word for heaven, Shamayim. He says that it may consist of the following: either the words Sa and Mayim, meaning "carrying water;" the words Sham and Mayim, meaning "there is water;" or the words Esh and Mayim, meaning "fire and water.

We know poor and middle class children exhibit certain differences in styles of talking and thinking, but we do not know yet why or how these differences occur.

The middle class child says a rock is a stone; a lower class child says a rock is hard, and you throw it.

Serious students of language (as it relates to social class) have dealt, not with simple-minded concepts like "verbal" and "nonverbal," but rather with issues of style and of differing ways of using and relating to language.

Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism.

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.