Quotes About Language

It's daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

No one can teach anyone to be a great anything. If your blood is on fire with the love of language and the desire to make something with words, you probably know that.

It's daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible. Is this one of the mysteries of travel? One returns to preverbal pointing, smiling, shaping the air with gestures.

we respond immediately to language that seems to be experience, rather than language that seems to describe experience from a distance

He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words' sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you speill them out the right way. p92

The documents were in English—sort of—but the language was so convoluted that it was beginning to give her a headache. It made for even duller reading than her chemistry text.

Oh–it's just–well, all I can say is, I'd never do anything so –so déclassé,' she finished on a note of smug satisfaction. Narrowing her eyes, Jessica glared at the phone in her hand. Where did Lila get off being so superior, using words like 'déclassé'?

The repetitions, meaningless expressions, stammers, and nonsensical monosyllables with which we express hesitation, along with the clichés and banalities that constitute so much of everyday conversation, cannot and should not be used when our characters are talking. Rather, they should speak more fluently than we do, with greater economy and certitude.

words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

Stories aren't about things. Stories are things. Stories aren't about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential.

Albanians don't get dyslexia. It's a disease Americans invented so they won't have to admit their kids are retarded.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.

what matters is not complexity or decoration but rather intelligibility, grace, and the fact that the sentence should strike us as the perfect vehicle for expressing what it aims to express…

Teaching students to value literary masterpieces is our best hope of awakening them to the infinite capacities and complexities of human experience, of helping them acknowledge and accept complexity and ambiguity, and of making them love and respect the language that allows us to smuggle out, and send one another, our urgent, eloquent dispatches from the prison of self.

Studying Latin can teach you how to think analytically.

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind tham lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

Should' is my all time least favorite word! It's this sort of guilt inducing, finger wagging word that we use to beat up ourselves and others.

Should' is my all time least favorite word. It's this sort of guilt inducing, finger wagging word that we use to beat up others and ourselves.

Should' is my all time least favorite word! It's this sort of guilt inducing, finger wagging word that we use to beat up ourselves and others.

Film is one if three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.

Perhaps if we were consciously able to use our bodies as fluently and expressively as we use language, we would find the physical reaction to each successful picture to be as particular and unique as our verbal formulations.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.