Quotes About Language

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

Male genitals are still called "the tree of life" by the Arabs, and a cross was one of the oldest diagrammatic images of male genitals.

I've had to spend an awful lot of my life trying to pretend I'm not posh. Although once I open my mouth, I rather let things out the bag.

But for now, let's assume that you're properly impressed with words' significance, and therefore stand ready to move on to a related but somewhat more involved aspect of the subject . . . the application of language to the manipulation of reader feelings. Is that important? I won't kid you. It's the foundation stone on which you as a writer stand or fall.

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on in the world between the covers of books, such sandstorms and ice blasts of words, such slashing of humbug, and humbug too, such staggering peace, such enormous laughter, such and so many blinding bright lights breaking across the just-waking wits and splashing all over the pages in a million bits and pieces all of which were words, words, words, and each of which were alive forever in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgement, and education -- Sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

I hate the guts of English grammar. … The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity…. You can say anything that comes into your head; never forget that.

Be obscure clearly.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

It was the language that left us first. The Great Migration of words. When people spoke they punched each other in the mouth. There was no vocabulary for love. Women became masculine and could no longer give birth to warmth or a simple caress with their lips. Tongues were overweight from profanity and the taste of nastiness. It settled over cities like fog smothering everything in sight. My ears begged for camouflage and the chance to go to war. Everywhere was the decay of how we sound.

The ability of humans to speak a modern language and the evolution of our ability to think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thus appear to parallel each other.

Collections of gnomes, adages, sayings, and parables have been made from times immemorial in all countries and in all languages possessing some kind of literature.

We read all twenty-eight emails. When she is finished, Mirren kisses me on the cheek. "I can't even say sorry," she tells me. "There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.

She believed that the way you speak is often more important than anything you have to say.

the way you speak is often more important than anything you have to say.

She believed that the way you speak is often more important than what you have to say.

What?" Frankie didn't think it was a word. She thought it was—she thought it was what she'd later call a "neglected positive.

When there's a negative word or expression-immaculate, for example-but the positive is almost never used, and you choose to use it, you become rather amusing. Or pretentious. Or pretentiously amusing, which can sometimes be good. In any case, you are uncovering a buried word.

Prayer is the language of a man burdened with a sense of need.

For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or—to put the thing less cynically—we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice.

Ethnos needs Logos, especially if it aspires, as every ethnic group does, to become a nation.

Being family gave you obligations. Jesus and Paul's language about church as family was radical talk and not merely cultural convention.

The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a "copy" of reality.