Quotes About Language

The point is that if the knowledge that provides the categories we use to describe our observations is defective, the observation statements that presuppose those categories are similarly defective.

When a diplomat says 'yes' he means 'maybe.' When a diplomat says 'maybe' he means 'no.' But if a diplomat says 'no' he's no diplomat.

I know you think you understand what you thought I said but Im not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

older vowels were showing through as he said that it was "awfully good of" his parents to have tolerated him.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A

Dehaene even allows himself a few moments of (justifiable) annoyance at the way that childhood reading experts continue their debates about the best strategies for teaching reading to children in complete ignorance of a large and growing body of work on how the human brain processes written language.

Yes, I know that the word "school" derives from scholia, meaning leisure.

It is easier to think in a foreign language than to feel in it. Therefore no art is more stubbornly national than poetry.

Words. Empty words. Sometimes I hate words. Sometimes they fail human experience. Sometimes words are a way to avoid the truth.

Yet the time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.

That pompous phrase (graphic novel) was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics.

I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

While a truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.

The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language. Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: "In the beginning was the Word.

It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you've got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots. In our lifetime, we will see Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch. -- Co.Create Online, 2-14-12

Nothing meant anything that couldn't be turned instantly into its opposite by any competent spin-doctor or spoon-bender. History and language had become so flexible, wrenched back and forth to suit each new agenda, that it seemed as if they might just simply snap in half and leave us floundering in a sea of mad Creationist revisions and greengrocers' punctuation.

The relentless onslaught of this stupefying imagery that pounds our inner landscapes flat, a carpet-bombing of the mind. The language of the world, that overwhelms us.

History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a function that we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world's insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own.

That's Beethoven's fifth... Da da da dum! Heh heh. That's morse code, y'know. Uh, morse code? Hmm. It's morse code for the letter v.

He missed the way Londoners sounded as he killed them – like they were offended that anyone would even dare.

I who am poisoned with the blood of both,Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?I who have cursedThe drunken officer of British rule, how chooseBetween this Africa and the English tongue I love?

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…