Quotes About Language

Zettle notes, we misuse many nouns in psychology instead of verbs and thereby create semifictional entities that Kevin Everett FitzMaurice (1997) calls "thought things." Thus we say, "My feelings upset me when panic overwhelms me when I am in closed spaces" instead of, "I upset myself by panicking when I am in closed spaces.

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God's creatures, ordered alphabetically or by numbers or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations.

Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.

Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book - that string of confused, alien ciphers - shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

Every time we put something into words, we simultaneously pronounce a declaration fo faith in the power of language to re-create and communicate our experience of the world, and our admission of its shortcomings to name this experience fully... All our libraries are the glorious record of that failure.

?????? ?????, ?????? ??????. ???????, ??????????? ? ???????????, III ??? ??.?.?.

To say "I" is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other.

What we put into words are the shadows of shadows, and every book confesses the impossibility of holding fully onto whatever it is that our experience seizes. All our libraries are the glorious records of that failure.

Dictionaries collect our words both to preserve them and to give them back to us, to allow us to see what names we have given to our experience throughout time, and also to discard some of those names and renew them in an ongoing ritual of baptism.... they confirm and invigorate the lifeblood of a language.

Hier in Buenos Aires träume ich auf Spanisch von Menschen, die nicht sprechen und mich nicht hören - und immer von der Stadt, wie ich sie früher kannte, niemals, wie sie heute ist.

alguém versado nas palavras deveria usá-las para ensinar, para deleitar e para transformar; isto é, ensinar ao ignorante, deleitar o enfastiado e transformar o indolente"39

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly–they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?

Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe;

Las palabras, como los rayos X, atraviesan cualquier cosa, si uno las emplea bien.

Dinted dimpled wimpled--his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.

Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them (...) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.

That one should have to talk about the mind in metaphors is unfortunate, but inevitable.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students—how to write piercingly.