Quotes About Language

Guys do have a language, and it does express emotion with startling clarity and nuance. The idea that they don't express their feelings is as absurd as traveling to a foreign country and claiming the natives can't speak simply because you don't understand what they're saying.

The past tense is forensic. It's all about blame. The present tense is demonstrative. It's all about values.

There can be a greater power in words than in all the steel within the Circle of the World.

Words are weapons. They should be handled with proper care.

A sentence has a subject and a verb and expresses a complete thought. However,

Fight your battles with words, not fists

If you are furious, and you've exhausted your reasoned argument but still want to get a powerful emotion across, then you might say, Fuck you. What I object to is the use of these impactful words as fillers, such as when people say, What the fuck are you doing? That's lazy. How is fuck helping that particular sentence

My dear sir,' said Emily, timidly, 'what mean those tears?'—they speak, I fear, another language—they plead for me.

When we are feeling at a loss in a poem, metaphor comes to the rescue. Metaphor is instructive, tactical, and interactive; it succeeds when its audience sees it as both strange and true. We need metaphor to make the error that allows us to reach beyond ourselves.

The object of linguistics is language; that of poetics is concrete utterance. Language is an institution, a formal system which constitutes, for the hypothetical speaker, a "competence"; it is a virtual object. Speech (the poetic utterance, for our purposes) is an individual act which formulates a concrete discourse; it is a "performance".

The ideal of musicality belongs to the stylistic layer of Symbolism, for music in literature is a function of language, of style. It is the stylistic element which is the most deeply rooted in the aesthetics and value-hierarchy of the Symbolist movement, and one which graphically illustrates the interrelatedness of ideas and of style, and the possibility of expressing ideas through the medium of art.

Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.

I'd rather you came out with your filthy, unfitting language for the rest of your life than for you to turn out one of them cowardly people who can't speak their minds but won't hold their peace and instead mumble behind hands and get their fights out in sneakery and in whispers.

Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.

To write incorporeal poems, almost without words. To approximate the impossible, where art disappears and the Word becomes.

The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That's the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.

I resent people who use phrases like "my first," so the person they're speaking to is practically obliged to imagine them having sex to complete the sentence. It's not nice.)

I want to be a word. I would be abstract with an inscrutable ending.

West Ukrainian men, like Poles, are addressed as 'Pan So-and-So'; central and eastern Ukrainians, like Russians, are 'Gospodin'. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox, but in the west a separate 'Uniate' church, founded at the end of the sixteenth century, combines Orthodox liturgy with obedience to the Pope.

Thus the heirs of Rus are not the Ukrainians, with their funny language and quaint provincial ways, but the far more successful Russians themselves.

Shine mobilizes the interstitiality between sight and feeling, visuality and textuality.

But in every country occupied by the Red Army, the definition of "fascist" eventually grew broader, expanding to include not only Nazi collaborators but anybody whom the Soviet occupiers and their local allies disliked. In time, the word "fascist," in true Orwellian fashion, was eventually used to describe antifascists who also happened to be anticommunists. And every time the definition was expanded, arrests followed.

The loss of freedom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, justice, the good of the people Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Lies, by their very nature partial and ephemeral, are revealed as lies when confronted with language's striving for truth. But here all the means of disclosure had been permanently confiscated by the police. —Aleksander Wat, My Century

It is an argument for moral equivalence, an argument that undermines faith, hope, and the belief that we can live up to the language of our Constitution.