Quotes About Language

Let thy speech be better than silence or be silent

Nymphomania is a word men invented for women stupid enough to act like men.

The way she said "dinner" and the way she said "champagne" gave meat and liquid their exact difference, as if by having surmounted two mediums, earth and air, her talent, running forward, achieved all others.

Nightwood is demanding. You can slide into it, because the prose has a narcotic quality, but you can't slide over it. The language is not about conveying information; it is about conveying meaning.

?uvaj se re?i, sine! ?uvaj ih se više no svega ljudskog.

I suppose that words equal sex, or at least enough words, six and a half hours' worth.

It was an arrangement, coldly conceived for sexual gratification, without even words that first time, but limited by coldly precise and rational language from there on out. The terms were that they would use each other's bodies for that ornate form of masturbation called Making Love, but there was to be no question of emotional involvement, or prying into one another's soul. This, they decided coldly, would keep them from going crazy.

Those who first acquired language and tried to think the human situation were utterly overwhelmed. They could cope only by imagining that there were greater invisible beings who could and did understand and control both the human psyche and the world. 'I can't make sense of it, but I have to believe that there is a larger perspective within which it all makes sense.

Effetha, que quiere decir, ábranse.

There were about 400 heads of state from countries all over the world. I walked out and played 'Hotel California,' and everybody in the place gave me a standing ovation, and half of those countries don't even speak English.

We'd insist that all truth was relative, that there was no reality without signifiers, that there was no there there, that nothing, in fact, really existed.

The aphorism is already a shadow of itself.

Political correctness? In my humor, I never talk about politics. I was never much into all that.

Siate gentili a parole, ma portatevi dietro un grosso candelotto di dinamite!

When the words are suspicious, go after them, insist they tell us what they mean. Go after the meaning of the words. And if the speakers say they are the kind who call things as they see them, that they don't mince words, and call a spade a spade if not a bloody shovel, go after them even harder. They're often the worst liars of the lot.

You know the word 'barbarian' came from the Romans? It meant 'redheaded.' They was talking about you people. I saw that on the—what do you call it?—the History Channel, last night.

Shit," Pablo says.

Eleven Benevolent Elephants. Yeah! Say that five times real fast.

Like a lot of painters in this century, you seem to enjoy lifting things out of the world, in this case words or phrases, and then... And then, sung to and Simonized, theyre thrown into the mesh.

One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects.

I think that the effort is to reach a realm of meaning that is not quite sayable. You stay away from what can be said and you try to reach what cant quite be said. Yet it is nevertheless meaningful. And there is such a realm and it is very difficult to talk about. Its not quite nonverbal, but that comes fairly close.

I am never needlessly obscure--I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.

However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.

Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.