Quotes About Language

Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

Translation is so important. The new American translations of the Bible sound like a Judith Krantz novel.

Like most Lebanese, Joumana speaks rapidly, one sentence dovetailing into another, producing guttural words and phrases as if gargling with mouthwash. I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversations with many pauses, pauses replacing words.

When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

Rarely was Arabic used for physics, chemistry, or mathematics in any of the schools of Beirut, whose main curriculum has always been community conformity. It seems that Arabic is not considered a language for logic. A joke that used to make the rounds when I was a child, probably still going strong: the definition of parallel lines in geometry textbooks in Saudi Arabia is two straight lines that never meet unless God in all His glory wills it.

They who from birth have had no other speech than the trembling of their lips learn a language of the eyes, endless in expression, deep as the sea, clear as the heavens, wherein play dawn and sunset, light and shadow. The dumb have a lonely grandeur like Nature's own. Wherefore

When we express our thought in words, the medium is not found easily. There must be a process of translation, which is often inexact, and then we fall into error. But

Man cannot reach the shrine if he does not make the pilgrimage. Languages are jealous. They do not give up their best treasures to those who try to deal with them through an intermediary belonging to an alien rival.

black eyes need no translating; the mind itself throws a shadow upon them. In them thought opens or shuts, shines forth or goes out in darkness, hangs steadfast like the setting moon or like the swift and restless lightning illumines all quarters of the sky. They who from birth have had no other speech than the trembling of their lips learn a language of the eyes, endless in expression, deep as the sea, clear as the heavens, wherein play dawn and sunset, light and shadow. The

They who from birth have had no other speech than the trembling of their lips learn a language of the eyes, endless in expression, deep as the sea, clear as the heavens, wherein play dawn and sunset, light and shadow.

But black eyes need no translating; the mind itself throws a shadow upon them. In them thought opens or shuts, shines forth or goes out in darkness, hangs steadfast like the setting moon or like the swift and restless lightning illumines all quarters of the sky. They who from birth have had no other speech than the trembling of their lips learn a language of the eyes, endless in expression, deep as the sea, clear as the heavens, wherein play dawn and sunset, light and shadow.

But here Nature fulfilled her want of speech and spoke fr her. The murmur of the brook, the voice of the village folk, the songs of the boatmen, the crying of the bird and the rustle of the trees mingled and were one with the trembling of her heart. They became one vast wave of sound which beat upon her restless soul. This murmur and movement of Nature were dumb girl's language; that speech of the dark eyes, which the long lushes shaded, was the language of the world about her.

You're kidding. I thought all geniuses read Latin. Isn't that the international language for smart people?"-Shane (Glass Houses)

I've given him more mixed signals than a dyslexic Morse code operator.

Language is not only the medium through which existence is transacted, it constitutes our central experiences of social and moral content, of such concepts as freedom and truth, and, most importantly, of indivduality and the self; it is also a system of lies, evasions, propaganda, misrepresentation, and conformity.

And the blabbing, the telling, was the messiest thing of all: getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. Only then did you know that you'd got the better of the things that had happened to you: when you controlled the story rather than it controlling you.

ellipsis, he'd been told, could literally be translated as 'to hide behind silence'. It's fascinating stuff, he said.

He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint. I asked him what his nationality was. 'I was sent to an English boarding school at the age of seven,' he replied. 'You might say I have the mannerisms of an Englishman but the heart of a Greek. I am told,' he added, 'it would be much worse the other way around.

At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.

Mothers are such liars,' he said. 'Language is all they have. They fill you up with language if you let them.

Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be. An image is also eternal, but it has no dealings with time – it disowns it, as it has to do, for how could one ever in the practical world scrutinise or comprehend the balance sheet of time that brought about the image's unending moment?

La personalidad debía adaptarse a las nuevas circunstancias lingüísticas para crearse de nuevo

There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable. I asked her whether she lived in Manchester, and she said no, she had just been up there to teach another course, and had had to fly straight from there to here.