Quotes About Language

I don't care what language the time passes in, the girl says. So long as it passes.

Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there's even more language waiting to come up.

A child grows up saying words that the rest of the world tells the child aren't words. But the child and everybody the child holds dear all know that the words mean, and what the words mean. Listen, that child will be equipped, from the very beginning. For everything, dark and light, heavy and light, that life will bring to that child.

H has moved to a town in Denmark that sounds like someone Scottish saying the word whorehouse.

In our era, it is because poetry is no longer practiced that some people can rediscover it in argot, in which the part of poetry remains small. Metaphors are to argot what the image of the Gypsy is to the Gypsy

The editor was often called a Bolshevist—as who is not in these days? For language is given us not only to conceal thought, but often to prevent it, and every now and then when the problems of the world become too complex and too vital, some one stops all thought on a subject by inventing a tag, like "witch" in the seventeenth century, or "Bolshevist" in the twentieth. Ben

She rarely cried at life, but certain turns of phrase prompted hot tears to sting her cheeks.

Each poet creates an expatriate space, a slightly skewed domain where things are freshly felt because they are freshly said.

I remembered how de Man had said to us in class, 'don't confuse any of this literary theory with your lives'—how we hadn't believed him, how we had wanted our criticism to tell us how to think and how to speak and how to live. De Man made literature matter more than anything in the world and then said it was only literature.

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.

We name us and then we are lost, tamed I choose words, more words, to cure the tameness, not the wildness

I can't translate myself into language any more.

Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language people just assumed that we were dumb

I am the only language I can understand.

I'm alive and dead now, at the same time, speaking in your poems.

In language I combine my flesh with yours, and you with mine; my flesh is tender, my skin aches from knowing you

You will receive in flashes a new knowledge in language you won't know.

I don't remember how to speak for myself anymore

All the different ways of talking English I throw together like a salad and dine greedily in my mongrel tongue.

When the children were very small I spent weeks alone with them high up in the Welsh hills and I used to lose the power of speech. I would return to London bereft of all vocabulary, communicating in grunts and diddums talk. You feel a fool asking, for instance, Professor Sir Alfred Ayer if he would care for an icky bitty more soup in his ickle bowl.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish.

You enter some activist space, Tumblr, a campus group, your neighborhood cultural center. You're expected to make mistakes, but to eventually never mess up anyone's pronoun, ever, to never accidentally use the wrong vocabulary, regardless of how educated you are, self-educated or formally.

Instead of Image, we possess Word. . . . words, unlike images, are powerful yet indeterminate, slip and slide and escape when you think you have them pinned, contain immeasurable dark interiors. An image is motionless, timeless. It gives itself to you immediately. But language moves, it exists only in time, in history, the past melting and rushing toward the future, provoking you, dancing away [ Out of the Garden ].