Quotes About Language

Didn't anyone ever tell you that the mouth is the front gate of all misfortune?

All fiction is about writing.

He called me "darling" in that obnoxious way gay men sometimes do.

Likewise, Oscar Wilde asked an English journalist to look over 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' before publication: "Will you also look after my 'wills' and 'shalls' in proof. I am Celtic in my use of these words, not English." Wilde's novel upset virtually every code of late Victorian respectability, but he had to get his modal auxiliaries just right.

Dü?manlar?n her biri; "özgürlü?ü savunmakta", "demokrasiyi sürdürmekte" ya da "adaleti desteklemekte" oldu?unu ileri sürerek tart??abilir, kavga edebilir ve hatta sava?abilir. Sorun, "özgürlük", "demokrasi" ya da "adalet" gibi sözcüklerin, farkl? insanlar için farkl? anlamlara gelmesidir; bundan dolay? da kavramlar?n kendileri sorunluymu? gibi görünmeye ba?larlar.

Siyaset uygulay?c?lar? ve profesyonel siyasetçiler, siyasal kavray??tan çok siyasal savunuculukla u?ra?t?klar?ndan, dili manipüle etme ve bazen kafa kar???kl??? yaratma amac?yla kullanma konusunda güçlü bir güdüye sahiptirler.

It's a darn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.

What I find remarkable is that so much of the 18th century literature that I read is more accessible than reading your alternative weekly from ten years ago. People really aspired to write clearly.

The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.

When I finally decided to do the show, I only had two weeks to learn the choreography and the songs in French.

I think maybe it's time for liberals to not start weeping when I say things like 'retard' or 'illegal alien.'

The government that governs from afar absolutely requires that the truth and the facts reach its knowledge by every possible channel, so that it may weigh and estimate them better, and this need increases when a country like the Philippines is concerned, where the inhabitants speak and complain in a language unknown to the authorities.

In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

Tears at times have the weight of speech.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Hyperbole is not easily dealt with. Usually, it collapses under its own weight.

Opinions only carry weight in the second or third person.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

Our weights fluctuate: Some people gain or lose, even friends who are average size. If I would say 'I'm fat,' my friends would say, 'Don't say that!' And I'd think, 'Are you offended, you can't handle the word? Or do you think I am embarrassed?'

I had a weird accent. Dutch people speak American English, and my parents were Jamaican, with their own broken English.