Quotes About Language

Then the language he had held to her rankled in her heart; she who was always 'love,' and 'darling,' and 'queen,' and 'angel,' with everybody at the Grange, to be insulted so shockingly by a stranger!

a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects;

still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears:

Some say once a word is said it's dead. I say it just begins to live that day.

Don't you know that No is the wildest word we consign to Language?

A word is dead when it said, some say... I say it just begins to live that day.

They fling their speech By means of it in God's ear;

Could mortal lip divine The undeveloped freight Of a delivered syllable, 'T would crumble with the weight.

sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.

It occurs to Blanche that English doesn't have French's useful distinction between libre , meaning that something's unconstrained, and gratuit , meaning that it costs nothing. Free thought, free speech, free love: the English word that Arthur was so fond of obscures the price of things.

Colleen ; that was what the Irish seemed to call every young female

It was as if I had spent thirteen years specialising in a certain language, only to discover all its speakers had scattered and renounced their native tongue. No, worse than that, because at least dead languages could be studied. This was as if I had spent my life learning to play a certain unique instrument, only to see some crazed vandal smash it to pieces.

Every symptom is a word in the language of disease, but sometimes we can't hear them properly. And even if we do, we can't always make out the full sentence... So we just shush them, one word at a time.

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.

idjits.' 'What's an idjit?' asked Anne.

she tried to say it. But she didn't get any further than 'Kollamooli'. Nor did the others.

Argy-bargying in double-Dutch like that. Do you want

Kollamoolitoomarellipawkyrollo

D'Arvit!" growled Root. (There is no point translating that word, as it would have to be censored.)

Mona began firing with deadly accuracy, also with a stream of Spanish words that Cosmo suspected were not taught in kindergarten.

We don't use the term savage Injun anymore. Some people take issue with being described as savages. Go figure.

Love can be a noun or a verb, she said.

Obviously, that's a translation.)

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