Quotes About Language

My grandmother was an English teacher for a while. And she stressed to me the importance of reading, being able to articulate well.

It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

Let the teachers learn the kids English. Ol' Diz will learn the kids baseball.

I'm into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.

Let the teachers teach English and I will teach baseball. There is a lot of people in the United States who say isn't, and they ain't eating.

It is a wry commentary on the value-system in the United States that one speaks there of "teacher training" and "driver education."

No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

It is not often that we use language correctly; usually we use it incorrectly, though we understand each others meaning.

If you don't read, I don't know how to communicate with you...I can never express who I am in my own words as powerfully as my books can.

I did my English A level in England, and we studied Shakespeare. I had great, great high school teachers, and we parsed the text within an inch of its life.

never use sarcasm in an email

Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.

How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a chest, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

Was it possible that some men possessed so great a force of character that they could stamp themselves upon their words such that no matter where they were read, or when, or in what language, their own distinctive tones would always be heard?

Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.

There are few expressions in the English language that are less attractive to women than 'Rare Book Dealer.

I think Compton is right when he says that the reason the English use this word is because it is they who think of us as 'barbarians'. They want war, so they are looking for excuses and even a word will do.

Bahram smiled to himself as he listened: the arguments were marvellously simple yet irrefutable. Really, there was no language like English for turning lies into legalisms.

it was Manutius who invented italics, introduced the semicolon and gave the comma its distinctive hooked shape. As

All our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters from other tongues and cultures.

A man who has the ability to generate a new word and to inject it into the bloodstream of the language seems to me only a little lower than the Creator of light and darkness. If you write a book, you may be fortunate enough to be read for a while, until other, better books come along and take its place; but to produce a new word is to approach immortality.