Quotes About Language

We should have signs in the subways and shops "Watch your thoughts!" "Watch your words!

YOUR WORD IS YOUR WAND. THE WORDS YOU SPEAK CREATE YOUR OWN DESTINY

Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]...

Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.

That in effect was love. It struck him as astonishing. The word was so little in his vocabulary...

Un estilo interesante consiste en una sucesión constante de diminutas, casi indetectables, sorpresas en el texto

Granpa said if there was less words, there wouldn't be as much trouble in the world. He said privately to me that there was always some damn fool making up a word that served no purpose except to cause trouble.

Pero lo que significa y cómo lo significa y quién lo dice y a quién le toca morir así; me gustaría creer que hay esperanza, digamos, en el hecho de poner atención a las palabras.

At which point my grief-sounds ricocheted outside of language. Something like a drifting swarm of bees. At which point in the tetric silence that followed I was swarmed by those bees and lost consciousness. At which point there was no way out for me either.

He would punctuate the remarkable things he said with silences, his extravagant gestures with absence.

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.

The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the years, more and more terrifying to him. Whether from laziness or from inability to find the right words, he had developed almost a passion for silence.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

Rondeau En chiant l'autre hier senti La gabelle qu'à mon cul dois; L'odeur fut autre que cuidois: J'en fus du tout empuanti O si quelqu'un eût consenti M'amener une qu'attendois En chiant! Car je lui eusse assimenti Son trou d'urine à mon lourdois; Cependant eût avec ses doigts, Mon trou de merde garanti, En chiant!

To speak robin to a robin is like speaking French to a Frenchman

How is it that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

How is it that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language that is not made up of words & everything in this world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything & it can always speak, without making a sound, to another soul.

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without making a sound, to another soul.

Yorkshire word and means spoiled and

Non, monsieur. Je n'ai pas le canif de mon oncle.' That

when Miss St. John called "le bon pain," "lee bong pang.

To hear this pretty childish voice speaking his own language so simply and charmingly made him feel almost as if he were in his native land - which on dark, foggy days in London sometimes seemed worlds away.

To hear this pretty childish voice speaking his own language so simply and charmingly made him feel almost as if he were in his native land — which in dark, foggy days in London sometimes seemed worlds away. When she had finished, he took the phrase-book from her, with a look almost affectionate. But he spoke to Miss Minchin. "Ah, madame," he said, "there is not much I can teach her. She has not learned French; she is French. Her accent is exquisite.

I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.