Quotes About Language

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

My mom had this romantic notion of her children playing classical music. The idea is you learn it when you're still learning language. It's using the same part of the brain.

The legal system works really well, if you communicate a certain way. But if you don't, it all goes to Hell in a handbasket really quickly.

Mastery of the German language and the acceptance of our legal system has to become part of the criteria for naturalization.

Never finish a negative statement; reverse it immediately, and wonders will happen in your life.

The more you talk about negative things in your life, the more you call them in. Speak victory not defeat.

If you want to change your life, begin by changing your words. Start speaking the words of your dreams, of who you want to become, not the words of fear or failure.

A different language is a different vision of life.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

So many needing so much to communicate what amounted to so little.

Democracy is not enough because it is never really Democracy. The -ism that will fix this has not been written down because it exists in what remains of the world beyond us and we cannot read that language. So we are left with flawed ways of thinking, mechanical ways, that work against the very organic nature of our brains. We have built so many toxic constructs, we cannot see through the latticework.

he'd said they were studying the "taywah" or "terror" of the region, even when he'd spelled it out as t-e-r-r-o-i-r.

We lack the analogies' was itself somehow deficient as a diagnosis, linguists burning up during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere after encountering Area X.

Although by then not much was disgusting because the word familiar had changed so much since I had woken.

I leaned in closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read.

Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite.

One person's inflammatory rhetoric is another person's poetry,

As the sign of a deeper truth, metaphor was close to sacrament. Because the vastness and richness of reality cannot be expressed by the overt sense of a statement alone.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

We prefer to say that Larry has a problem with tenses. For example, 'our product is available now' might mean it'll be available in a few months or that Larry was thinking about one day developing the product.