Quotes About Language

A boca podia ser o cálix, os lábios a pátena. Faltava dizer a missa nova, por um latim que ninguém aprende, e é a língua católica dos homens. Não me tenhas por sacrílego, leitora minha devota; a limpeza da intenção lava o que puder haver menos curial no estilo.

Quantas intenções viciosas há assim que embarcam, a meio caminho, numa frase inocente e pura! Chega a fazer suspeitar que a mentira é, muita vez, tão involuntária como a transpiração.

porque o adjetivo é a alma do idioma, a sua porção idealista e metafísica. O substantivo é a realidade nua e crua, é o naturalismo do vocabulário.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Poets are born knowing the language of angels.

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast

But she finds it so difficult to verbalize, Charles dear. It helps her if she can quote instead of working out words of her own.

Fewmets is my new swear word. I'm tired of all the old ones.

Alas. What have we done to our good, bawdy, Anglo-Saxon four-letter words? ...We have blunted them so with overuse that they no longer have any real meaning for us. ...When will we be able to redeem our shock words? They have been turned to marshmallows. ...We no longer have anything to cry in time of crisis. 'Help!' we bleat. And no one hears us. 'Help' is another of those four-letter words that don't mean anything any more.

As a child, when I came across a word I didn't know, I didn't stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens.

But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

People like me spend years learning the techniques of meditation. But you're a poet, and poets are born knowing the language of angels.

Ach,' she heard someone saying, 'I left mein ceinture dans le shower ce morgen. Quelle dope ich bin!

The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one. I

What a child doesn't realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairy tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture.

We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethans used "um" and "er" the way we do?

Science, literature, art, theology: it is all the same ridiculous, glorious, mysterious language.

And perhaps if we ever have real equality with all our glorious differences, the language itself will make the appropriate changes. For language, like a story or a painting, is alive. Ultimately it will be the artists who will change the language (as Chaucer did, as Dante did, as Joyce did), not the committees.

I love anything that is going to make language richer and stronger. But when words are used in a way that is going to weaken language, it has nothing to do with the beautiful way that they can wriggle and wiggle and develop and enrich our speech, but instead it is impoverishing, diminishing. If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free—though we may buy more of the product.

The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give to our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create.

The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give to our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create. The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to think for ourselves. We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands, so does our power to think.

The language of logical argument, of proofs,is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling,moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the free language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith.

One of the most pusillanimous things we of the female sex have done throughout the centuries is to have allowed the male sex to assume that mankind is masculine.