Quotes About Language

Nabokov once answered a question he must have been tired of being asked: "My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language." That something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in to claim understanding and empathy do they call it tragedy. One's grief belongs to oneself; one's tragedy, to others.

Often I think that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living. Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one's private language. That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections. But one must be cautious when assuming meaning. A moment of recognition between two people only highlights the inadequacy of language. What can be spoken does not sustain; what cannot be spoken undermines.

There could be many different Chinese characters for a name like hers, she explained. The characters her parents had chosen for her meant quietness. "Silence?" she tried again, sounding out the word, but then said the meaning was more like reticence. "It means for someone to choose not to express an opinion, to refrain from speaking.

Adjectives are my guitly pleasure.

Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.

One smiling woman shook my hand and said, 'My, but you speak English so beautifully.' She had meant to compliment me, but I was so astonished,, I didn't know what to say. I realized she had seen only my outer self — my Japanese face — and addressed me as a foreigner. I knew then that I would always be different, even thought I wanted so badly to like my white American friends.

We allow words to obscure the interpretation of the deeper meaning.

I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.

I think there are so many ways to become interested in music. I believe signs of sustained interest gives a sense of the right time. Music, if thought of as a language, would perhaps indicate that as early as possible is not so bad. I do believe that a really nurturing first teacher that makes the child love something is crucial.

If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own.

Those immediately behind number 50 were anguish personified. They let loose an endless stream of foul language and it was hard to tell whether they were cursing themselves or cursing something else. My neighbours and I in the last third of the queue only felt a pang of disappointment whereas those who just missed out on the coupon were like people who see the duck that they had cooked flap its wings and fly away.

Si la littérature est réellement dotée d'une force mystérieuse, c'est bien celle-là: la possibilité pour un lecteur de retrouver ses propres impressions dans l'œuvre d'un écrivain d'une autre époque, d'un autre pays, d'un autre peuple, d'une autre langue et d'une autre culture.

People who wear only ready-made clothes are apt to doubt the very existence of tailors; and this pair, enthralled though they were by ready-made tragedies, had no way of knowing that there were people who had their tragedies made to order. Etsuko was, as ever, written in an alphabet they couldn't read.

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins.

Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too.

Não se pode explicar alguma coisa meramente lhe dando um nome.

Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too.

Stutter, stutter!

You know among people who kind of travel a lot and have exposure to the United States and some other countries, they do have accounts, but you know, Russia is not exactly the place with multiple language skills so local networks kind of have an edge.

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.

the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.

This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.

But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.