Quotes About Language

In fact, neither reader nor writer nor lover achieves such consumation. The words we read and the words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

Depression is one of the unknown modes of being. There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity. All language can register is the slow return to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape and habit blurs perception and language takes up its routine flourishes.

Excuse me, where is the library at? - At Harward we don't end the sentence with preposition - Excuse me, where is the library at, jerk!?

Aye subtle hen

Punctuation was, it is sad to say, invented a very long time ago. Even more frustrating, it has remained with us ever since.

But was talking aloud allowed?

Prithee Sirrah and Begorrah.

He dribbled noise.

One French tulip was called a Coquille marbr e, a marbled shell.

Americans were most likely good people...the only thing wrong with them, David thought, was that they spoke English very badly.

His interviews revealed that the majority of Sak's employees, half of Macy's, but only one-fifth of Klein's sounded the 'r' clearly, bearing out his theory that a more emphasized 'r' was now the more prestigious pronunciation, and that social class is inscribed in the pronunciation of even a single sound.

No other mammal produces even a fraction of the kind of original vocal play that human babies do.

To adventure into the figurative meanings of his words was where the inherent danger resided.

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.

Imagery—the core of metaphoric language—will surprise, grab, inform, and persuade your listeners as mere explanation will not. Vivid

Once you go blind, unfortunately, words are all you've got.

Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.

I think language is beautiful. I even think insanity is beautiful (surely the root of language), except that it is painful.

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees. I confess I am only broken by the sources of things; as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic, unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings. I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.