Quotes About Language

It's like there are these words, they're out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power—they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them.

A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming.

An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You'd been talking to your mom since you were one year old and listening to her for even longer, but you couldn't remember a single word of what you or she had said before your hippocampus kicked into gear. Your

It was heartbreaking to see old Ossis trying to ape the thinking of Wessis, trying to master the lingo of capitalist self-promotion.

Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term.

Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her turds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since they were only words, they tasted like excellent dark chocolate.

How many times had he read the word joy without having experienced what it meant?

there was language everywhere; you could read the city, the city was a grammar

How's it feel to be a worthless jumbo diddly-ass puppetool?

We admit the presence of no author, no oeuvre, and no genre. The text stands bare. . . . We admit nothing outside of the text.

Henry said, getting up to piss against a tree, the coming of the white man ain't all bad. I like the Chinooks and all, the Flatheads, too, but there's something about talking in your native tongue that just lets the friendship flow better.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

i couldn't speak the language of his feelings

Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.

It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.

Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?

I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once. Huh? It said, 'Oeuf.' What is that? It's a joke. Do you want to hear another, or have you already had un oeuf?

Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum!

Encoded into our language is the understanding that disasters tend to expose that which was previously hidden. As the planetary crisis unfolds as a series of emergencies, our decisions will reveal who we are.

I can't even say 'hair pie,'' I told him, 'unless I'm talking about an actual pie made out of rabbits....