Quotes About Language

There are a thousand metaphors and all of them are inaccurate

As she [Anna] sweeps the workroom floor, as she lugs another roll of fabric or another bucket of charcoal, as she sits in the workroom beside Maria, fingers numb, breath pluming over the silk, she practices her letters on the thousand blank pages of her mind. Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.

But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

For a moment Zeno feels that he might be able to speak it into existence: if he says exactly the right words, right now, like a magic spell, it will happen.

If there are fireflies this summer, they do not come down the rue Vauborel. Now it seems there are only shadows and silence. Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. ... So many windows are dark. It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

Boil the words you already know down to their bones," Rex says, "and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.

A is ???? is alpha: the inverted head of an ox. ? is ???? is beta: based on the floor plan of a house. ? is ? ???? is omega, the mega O: a great whale's mouth opening to swallow all the letters before it.

It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don't know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we're doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

Boil the words you already know down to their bones and usually you will find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.

?????, ornis, it means both bird and omen—

Sometimes I understood what a word meant from reading but had never met it in life.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

Words fail us. They are like keys: they open, but they also shut. When we were small and could hardly raise ourselves from the floor, we curled our fingers around the fingers of mother and father, and we looked into their faces as they looked into ours. Where is the word for that?

It is precisely because we believe in democracy as a talisman, a heal-all, that we are prone to the disintegration of language that characterizes Life Under Compulsion. It

The eastern half of the empire spoke Greek and boasted a culture that went back to Homer.

He used language as a place for us to hide.

Alan invented all sorts of ways of expressing things so that only he and I understood. He used language as a place for us to hide.

From my experience, law firms are always quiet places. Maybe it's because they make words so expensive that they tend to use them sparingly among themselves.

German accent, as if he

Swear words in books have always struck me as lazy and over-familiar. But the 'c' word is more than that. It's used by sour, frustrated men, nearly always about women. It's a word full of misogyny – crudely offensive.