Quotes About Language

But words are all we have, their essence the only passage into our centers, the only way we can make people feel what we feel

In other words our own earliest sense of self-identity is associated with learning the language of our cultural womb.

Once she read a book but found it distasteful because it contained adjectives.

It was so important to him, and he made it important to me: poetry, and language, and how we use it to remind ourselves of how our lives should be lived . . .

Precision of language, Jonah.

It was so—oh, I wish language were more precise! The red was so beautiful!" The Giver nodded. "It is." "Do you see it all the time?" "I see all of them. All the colors." "Will I?

Jonas was careful about language.

It was so - oh, I wish language were more precise! The red was so beautiful!

She kept lists of her favorite words.

He thrust his tongue into his cheek, wrinkled his nose and creased his forehead. He made a chortling sound.

I didn't reply as he had hoped to a student who emailed me some years later, with the request "Please list all the similes and metaphors in The Giver," I'm sure it contained those as well.)

Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it's become almost obsolete," his mother explained carefully.

But he was a happy and easygoing toddler. Now he moved unsteadily across the room, laughing. "Gay!" he chirped. "Gay!" It was the way he said his own name.

Ah." "And what does ah mean?" he asked, slightly exasperated. "It's sort of like biting my tongue, but less painful.

Do you speak Gaelic Noah? she suddenly asked. His heart clenched. It actually hurt, as though spikes of steel had been dug into it. should I? Maybe not...

Jessica swallowed. I think you had better stick to English. But Italian is so moving, Dain said. To ho voluto dal primo che ti vedi. I've wanted you from the first moment I saw you. Mi tormenti ancora. You've tormented me ever since.

I didn't know how to communicate my suffering to anyone else. My anger was returning. I was screaming for help, but the language I was speaking no one seemed to understand.

Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce

Yes, she said. 'I Been Working on the Railroad.'There's just two things I'm worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.

A lie to the faithless is merely a conversation in their language.

Which is it, she asked. Is it CLIToris or clotORis? I didn't know. Why didn't I know? It may depend on which you have, I said.

We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps . . . it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.

I loved to say quasi. I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of, or kind of, and it had become a tic. I am quasi ready to go, I would announce. Or, I'm feeling a bit quasi today. Murph called me Quasimodo. Or Kami-quasi. Or wild and quasi girl.

It's bad enough when they refer to medical science as 'an inexact science,' says the Mother. But when they start referring to it as 'an art,' I get extremely nervous.