Quotes About Language

As proffering, I love you is on the side of expenditure. Those who seek the proffering of the word (lyric poets, liars, wanderers) are subjects of expenditure; they spend the word as if it were impertinent (base) that it be recovered somewhere; they are at the extreme limit of language, where language itself...recognizes that it is without backup or guarantee, working without a net

The dream: to know a foreign language yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity... to undo our own "reality" under the effect of other formulations, other syntaxes... in a word, to descend into the untranslatable.

Writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti­ communication, it is intimidating.

This, which is true of the literary modes of writing, in which the unity of the signs is ceaselessly fascinated by zones of infra- or ultra-language, is even truer of the political ones, in which the alibi stem­ming from language is at the same time intimidation and glorification : for it is power or conflict which produce the purest types of writing.

Myth, on the contrary, is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses.

Aucun n'est d'un métal si pur qu'il laisse l'autre sans voix.

Voler son langage à un homme au non même du langage, tous les meurtres légaux commencent par là.

Le mythe est une parole choisie par l'histoire : il ne saurait surgir de la « nature » des choses.

Nije li najbolnija to?ka tog žalovanja u tome što moram izgubiti jedan jezik - ljubavni jezik? Svršeno je s onim 'Volim te.')

This is the meaning of what is euphemistically called *dialogue*: not to listen to each other, but to submit in common to an egalitarian principle of the distribution of language goods.

one can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history…

El texto que usted escribe debe demostrarme que me desea. Esa prueba existe: es la escritura. La escritura es esto: la ciencia de los gozos del lenguaje, su kamasutra (de esta ciencia no hay más que un tratado: la escritura misma).

Love's atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.).

Roland Barthes

Language is a skin : I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

If only we could put our minds in plaster casts like our legs! But I cannot keep from thinking from speaking; no director is there to interrupt the interior movie I keep making of myself, someone to shout *Cut!* Volubility is a specifically human misery; I am language mad; no one listens to me, no one looks at me, but...I go on talking

Roland Barthes

è sterile ricondurre l'opera a qualcosa di puramente esplicito, perché allora non c'è, immediatamente, più nulla da dirne e perché la funzione dell'opera non può consistere nel chiudere le labbra di coloro che la leggono

Roland Barthes

3 de abril de 1978 Desesperación: la palabra es demasiado teatral, forma parte del lenguaje. Una piedra.

The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.

In another message he wrote, "I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.

Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero's orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be 'so well acquainted with Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.

Congress was chased like a covey of partridges from Philadelphia to Trenton, from Trenton to Lancaster," Adams wrote with his usual gift for evocative language.