Quotes About Language

Thus, all the articulated visions of prophecy are nothing more than ways of representing an abstract, formless, spiritual reality in the vocabulary of human language; although, to be sure, there may also be a revelation of an angel in quite ordinary form, clothed in some familiar vessel and manifested as a "normal" phenomenon in nature.

I can't really do much with Nietzsche. He is more an artist than a philosopher; he doesn't have the crystal-clear understanding of Schopenhauer. Of course, I value Nietzsche as a genius. He writes possibly the most beautiful language that German literature has to offer us today, but he is not my guide.

Words build bridges into unexplored regions.

I was so embarrassed about mispronouncing words. I just knew how to smile.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence.

A language is a map of our failures

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are. I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you.

We need poetry as living language, the core of every language, something that is still spoken, aloud or in the mind, muttered in secret, subversive, reaching around corners, crumpled into a pocket, performed to a community, read aloud to the dying, recited by heart, scratched or sprayed on a wall. That kind of language.

We murmur moonwords.

In the past when I was in Hollywood, I was like a dog. I felt humiliated. My English was not good. People would even ask me 'Jackie Who?'.

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

Russian is a really hard language - but I've got my own personal teacher. He's been really patient.

I think Americans are really patriotic people, so patriotism is something they can understand. I'm very patriotic about Brazil, my country, and that includes my language.