Quotes About Language

I swear over everything from being woken up in the middle of the night to realizing I've left the wet clothes in the washer for three days. At this point, "fuck" isn't even a swear word anymore; sentences just don't sound right unless it's interspersed somewhere.

There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they had been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.

The brain is a trashcan, though perhaps the best of all possible trashcans.

Il linguaggio umano è, in fondo, il grande scandalo della natura: il linguaggio umano costringe a riconoscere una discontinuità immotivata e improvvisa tra gli esseri viventi.

La punteggiatura è come l'elettroencefalogramma di un cervello che sogna - non dà le immagini ma rivela il ritmo del flusso sottostante.

Colonialism was not just an economic and political system, it was also a cultural system. Loyalty to empire was created through language, as well as through the church and the school. Both of these institutions taught the superiority of Europeans, their beliefs and their culture, and the inferiority of Africans, and, for that matter, of all non-British peoples

There are certain cities and certain areas of certain cities where the official language is dreams. Venice is one. And Paris. North Beach in San Francisco. Wenceslaus Square in Prague. And New Orleans, the city that dreams stories. Writers come and eavesdrop and take some of those stories with them, but these are just a few drops from a Mississippi river of stories.

The Hungarian language, Magyar, resembles Finnish, Your Honor, though its lack of vowels could be attributed to them having been snatched by the wind when the horse-mounted nomad warriors shouted to one another. Allow me to quote Illirio Tepius, a Byzantine traveler, who wrote in 1232 that "when Hungarians speak, there is a windlike whistle that propels the words forward, as if they never dismounted.

It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.

With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.

This is important, Your Honor, because it establishes the fact that language, like blood, is a living thing that proceeds forward in time.

Money undergoes a conversion when one has more of it than is strictly necessary. When there is enough of it to move beyond the strict survival mode, money goes in search of beauty. That is to say, in search of the abstract and the imaginary. Just like poetry, which is the distillation of an excess of language. Too much money and too many words tend toward the poetic.

I was always admonished by my English teachers in their heavily accented, Viennese-inflected English not to speak this abomination of an "American dialect" or "American slang" and never to use "American spelling" with its simplifications that testified prima facie to the uncultured and simpleton nature of Americans.

cannot recall a single one of my numerous stays in German-speaking Europe in which I was not at some time confronted with the lovely statement, "The Americans don't even speak proper English.

There are also specific cultural fetishes and phobias unique to France. No European country pursues so rigid a linguistic policy as France, a nation that has always viewed its language as both an antiAmerican and an anti-English bulwark.

Of course in Germany, too, there have been occasional efforts to keep the German language clear of foreign (meaning, as a rule, English and French) influences. 77 And, of course, there are still organizations in Germany, like the Verein Deutsche Sprache e.V. (German Language Association), that have made a mission out of protecting the German language from contamination by American English.

Por la corrupción del lenguaje empiezan otras muchas corrupciones..." "By the corruption of language many other corruptions begin ...

A book without words is like love without a kiss; it's empty.

There's a lot of interesting words, nomenclatures, in science.

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.

To get his ducks in a row. Odd expression. Can you imagine how hard that would actually be? With real ducks?" "So he could make his killing." "Yes. But you let the cat out of the bag. Another odd turn of phrase. What sort of bastard would put a cat in a bag in the first place? What is it about us and animals?

William Shakespeare

With every fragment of rock that fall from me, I can hear the voice of Marianne Engle. I love you. Aishiteru. Ego amo te. Ti amo. Eg elska pig. Ich liebe dich. It is moving across time, coming to me in every language of the world, and it sounds like pure love.

In those days, you must understand, children were basically thought to be inadequate adults. A child's nature was not something that could be developed, because character was set at birth; childhood was a period of revelation, not development, so when my language abilities appeared they were thought to have always existed, placed there by God, waiting to be made known.