Quotes About Language

If you are an alien, how come you sound like you're from the north?' 'Lots of planets have a north!

Wilf: God bless the cactuses! The Doctor: That's cactI. Alien: And that's racist!

In the time it takes to say 'now,' now is already over. It's already 'then.' 'Then' is the opposite of 'now.' So saying 'now' obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't.

Where do words come from? They come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the dead to life.

I started to think about how words and stories are time beings, too

Human language is a clumsy tool. People have such a hard time understanding each other, so how can you even begin to imagine the subjectivities of animals and insects and plants, never mind pebbles and sand? Bound as you are by your senses -- so blunt and yet so beautiful -- it's impossible for you to imagine that the myriad beings you dismiss as insentient might have inner lives, too. Books are in an odd position, caught halfway in between. We are sensible, if not sentient. We are semi-living.

But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then. Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates it's meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't.

What do scissors sound like? What did they say? Sly and steely, they started softly, a small susurration that quickly grew, whispering and slicing, hissing and metallic, forming what sounded more like human words, in a language Benny took to be Chinese, although he couldn't be sure. He didn't speak Chinese, so how could he know? But he seemed to understand all the snide, snippy things they insinuated into his ear about his teacher, Ms. Pauley.

Only novels! Only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language!

lady," a word she had found out came from the Anglo-Saxon "lafdig," meaning "she who makes the bread.

In Japan, even when you're alone, you're never really that lonely. But the loneliness you feel living among people with differently coloured skin and eyes, whose language you don't even speak very well - that sort of loneliness is something you feel down to the marrow of your bones.

The instant you put something like that into words, it was gone. Words and combinations of words - the more you relied on them, the less power you actually had.

She wanted to find out about the gods of this country, but she couldn't find any books on the subject in Spanish, and she doesn't read English, so she asked a lot of her customers, but apparently none of the Japanese knew anything, which made her wonder if people here never came up against the kind of suffering where you can't do anything but turn to your god for help. . .

Just before words vanish they acquire a sickening pulpy smell, like clumps of dead grass whipped by the wind into dry little spheres, and they spill from the brain and the vocal cords, down through the blood vessels and nerves to the deepest, farthest corners of your body.

Y de nada serviría intentar analizar cómo lo había logrado. Desde el momento que pones algo así en palabras, lo pierdes. Las palabras y las combinaciones de palabras: cuanto más dependieras de ellas, menor era tu poder real.

Cada una de las lenguas europeas es rica, solo que su riqueza no se manifiesta sino en la descripción de su propia cultura, en la representación de su propio mundo. Sin embargo, cuando se intenta entrar en territorio de otra cultura, y describirla, la lengua desvela sus límites, su subdesarrollo, su impotencia semántica.

Every day I practice yoga, read poetry, and translate. What do I need politics for?

Le lingue europee sono ricche solo finché si tratta di descrivere la propria cultura, di rappresentare il proprio mondo: appena si addentrano nelle culture altrui e cercano di parlarne, rivelano subito i loro limiti, la loro povertà, la loro inadeguatezza semantica.

To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro-Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same.

So what do you talk about?' I asked. One of them replied: 'This and that.' On this basis I could not deduce whether these conversations are interesting or boring, because I do not possess the Egyptological talent that can derive the stormy history of a dynasty from a single hieroglyph

Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.

So soon as I talk I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me.

It is said that Mathematics is the language of nature. If so, Physics is its poetry.

The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.