Quotes About Language

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

It takes more energy to find the words to describe poems than almost anything I can think of, except of course for trying to find the damn words to write one.

An inverse relationship exists in contemporary western Europe between an overtly fascist "look" and succeeding at the ballot box. So the leaders of the most successful extreme Right movements and parties have labored to distance themselves from the language and images of fascism.

Afternoon light like pollen. This is my language, not the one I learned.

Though her grasp of English was modest and his Italian non-existent, their rapport was at once intuitive and intimate, founded more on physical attraction and a shared love of the outdoors than meaningful conversation.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

In these days of political, personal and economic disintegration, music is not a luxury, it's a necessity; not simply because it is therapeutic, nor because it is the universal language, but because it is the persistent focus of our intelligence, aspiration and goodwill.

Shortly before his death, he gave a toast to economics and economists -'trustees, not of civilisation, but of the possibilities of civilisation'. Only someone with a fine sense of language, and an Edwardian sense of life's purpose, would have chosen exactly those words.

The word 'unemployment' first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1888 – a sign of things to come

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or 'cubist' visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars—in short a paradox.

This linguistic work, however, is not all that they do. They also function in intentionality: the syntax of language is related to the way things can present themselves to us, to the way we can intend and articulate them.

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

When dinosaurs want to communicate, they must use a lot of exaggerated body motions--head-bobs, torso-squats, tail-swooshes--because the range of their facial expressions is so limited. Mammals, as they will evolve in the later Cretaceous and beyond, will have far greater subtlety in body language. Dogs and monkeys and finally humans will acquire ever-greater powers of transmitting emotions through the face.

In the words of the Cambridge don Roger Ascham, Elizabeth I's tutor, one should "speak as the common people do…think as wise men do." Thomas

It seems better to me, if it seems so to you, that we…should translate certain books, which are most necessary for all men to know, into the language that we can all understand, and…that all the young freeborn men…may be set to study…until a time when they are able to read English writing well.

We have Dragon [dictation software]," one primary care doctor said, "which you have to be careful of, because I just [dictated] 'Patient's prostate is bothering him' and it turned out 'Patient's prostitute is bothering him.

The gangster is the man of the city, with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club.

He pointed to the board where the word 'alliteration' had been written in handwriting far better than mine, which on good days looks like it came from the hand of a blind doctor writing his own morphine scripts in an earthquake.

Bernard Shaw's play My Fair Lady.

Las palabras son de elástico, las manos de greda, van guardando las huellas, dicen la verdad sobre las personas. Graban la historia de la persona.

la relatividad de nuestra memoria que magnifica o empequeñece a discreción, un lenguaje que creemos conocer y que en verdad no conocemos.

On the ride back to the hotel, they lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although hostile wasn't the word, an environment whose language they refused to recognize, an environment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldn't make their presence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless they argued, something they had no intention of doing.