Quotes About Language

It was believed that all creation came from thought, language, and mathematics.

Don't worry. I'm not afraid of words.

He was so pale the freckles stood out on his face the way they did when he was upset or hadn't slept. She thought they might be telling her something if she could only understand the language of freckles.

Language was everything. Trust was for fools. Love came and went. Words could be stolen.

After living with his art in my own chamber, I saw there was more than mere mimicry, and that art was a world unto itself, with its own symbols and language. A leaf seen in a certain light might be gray or violet as well as purple, and a latticework of twigs might easily turn red as the sky paled above the city.

That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing," Frances informs her niece. "That's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.

words that have been said cannot be unspoken

In the dining room, my brother—the scholar—was asking my father what it meant, amadan. My father said, "A fool. It means someone's a fool." Even with the water running, the cup of soapy water at my lips, I could hear my father's shout of laughter when my brother asked him, "Who is?

our mother recalled it. But the nun's language in these matters—matters of the body, of the flesh, what went on between women and men—

What is addiction really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood. The drug business would not nourish if there were not so many people who, in refusing to acknowledge their wounds, are in a permanent state of self-betrayal. Thus, people work to get rid of symptoms instead of searching out the cause.

The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.

Jackson of course knew that books existed because people sat down and wrote them. They didn't just appear out of the blue. But why, was the question. There were books already in existence, plenty of them. Two of which he had to read at school. A Tale of Two Cities and Huckleberry Finn, each of them with language that wore you down though in different ways. And that was understandable. They were written in the past.

My sister and I didn't know what that meant either but we were not equal to two questions in a row. And I knew that wasn't what rape meant anyway; it meant something dirty. "Purse. Purse stolen," said my mother in a festive but cautioning tone. Talk in our house was genteel.

A simple serpent! . . we used to call ourselves simple serpents. Civil serpents. Servants.

father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my

She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English.

They tried to explain to the missionaries that it was they who put Adam and Eve out of the village because they was naked. Their word for naked is white. But since they are covered by color they are not naked. They said anybody looking at a white person can tell naked, but black people can not be naked because they can not be white.

Sugar, she say one day when Shug home, don't you think it be nice if Celie could talk proper? Shug say, She can talk in sign language for all I care.

The most sturdy nouns fell to faint approximations under my pen.

I have never heard a lady say 'arse,' the emperor said mildly. I haven't been a lady for long, I reminded him. A little demon–made of exhaustion and the emperors smile– pushed me into adding,For five years I've been saying 'arse.' It's hard to stop saying 'arse' after that many years. I suppose I should stop saying 'arse,' since ladies don't say- 'Arse', he finished for me. I met his grin.

Like their parents, the Korean children used more verbs than the English-speaking kids, while the English-speaking kids used more nouns. But in addition, the Korean-speaking children learned how to solve problems like using the rake to get the out-of-reach toy well before the English-speaking children. English speakers, though, started categorizing objects earlier than the Korean speakers.

When Karen speaks in Farsi, which she does even with her children, the tone of her Southern drawl colours the language in a strange an inimitable way. I listen for several minutes and decide that Farsi is, by nature, a language of deep greens and browns, and that Karen speaks it in bright red swaths.

Tie an Italian's hands behind his back and he'll be speechless.

The poetry is like a rhythmic articulation of feeling." —Allen Ginsberg