Quotes About Language

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.

Words were secret doorways and I held all the keys.

If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.

if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without proper home or a legimate identity.

He said I would appreciate later the gift he was giving me. He said that if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.

He said that if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

A l'école, nous jouions à un jeu appelé sherganji, la bataille des poèmes.

Baginya, kata-kata yang tertulis di halaman buku hanyalah serangkaian kode acak, tidak terpecahkan, misterius.

Kata-kata adalah pintu rahasia dan akulah pemegang kuncinya.

I can't go to America. I don't want to go to any foreign land where I don't speak the language or know the customs. I'd rather die here by the Vietcong's hands, among my ancestors, than live like a ghost among strangers. You go!

An existing individual is constantly in process of becoming,... and translates all his thinking into terms of process. It is with (him)... as it is with a writer and his style; for he only has a style who never has anything finished, but 'moves the waters of the language' every time he begins, so that the most common expression comes into being for him with the freshness of a new birth.

This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called "the unsayable said." If

I do so like all-encompassing words. Verb, adjective, noun. Yes, you are shitted.

And L-M-N-O-P is not one letter, but five. It took me forever to figure that out.

Just tape my ass shut and let me fart out my mouth.

Son of a beaver biscuit…

Where was our language of reverence? Of sacredness? Every year in America we add hundreds of words to our dictionaries that describe our infatuation with pop culture and technology, but none that describe a deepening regard for the natural world.

Every year in America we add hundreds of words to our dictionaries that describe our infatuation with pop culture and technology, but none that describe a deepening regard for the natural world.

Language is but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make a point.

Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I always speak as plainly as I can. And yet language, and therefore thought, is a strange and imprecise game of metaphors and analogies, one that we must play to stay alive.

Allah protect us,' Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, 'In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.' In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite.

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things.