Quotes About Language

I talked to your maid over the telephone and she didn't understand me very well, so I said," Vous étes espagnole, n'est-ce pas?" Alors, je suis M. Miller. Bon! Crazy, crazy. [. . .]

You need to take language lessons from me, regularly and obediently, until I pronounce you cured.

This is not language, this is the world being turned inside out, not mathematically in super-dimensional planes, not artistically in violaceous daring, but biologically, atomically, so that not even the creator can any more recognize his world.

If you look at language merely as craft you are committing lèse-majesté towards your own sacred tools. You've got to have the proper respect—you've got to feel awed in its presence (see, I say "awed," not "sacred").

Whore" goes, "Christ" goes, "shit" goes, etc. And yet somehow there is not the same ring behind his dirty words as with mine. Sincere enough, frank, honest, but not so raw. Almost seems justifiable. Mine seems flagrant and wanton.

But that is poetry, I protest. Poetry is an abstraction.

Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.

I've often thought of loss as a kind of language. Once learned, it's never forgotten. I learned the language of loss when I was ten, and still know it to this day. There have been times when I wished I had a scar or a mark, a visible sign of the pain I still feel over Daddy's death and Carter's. It would be easier, in a way, if people knew without my having to say anything that I am not whole, that part of me died long ago.

When one talks it's in order to be understood.

Words are traitors, for language tends to impose more logic than there is logic in life, and that the most precious in us is that which remains unexpressed.

Words make love with one another.

the translator of prose is the slave of the author and the translator of poetry is his rival.

The life these words speak of is not worth the ink they are written in.... He now knows that the only words worth writing down arise when language is impossible.

An exile's only country is his country's literature.

Mi chiamo Davide Griffo e sono mortificato per avere alzato la voce, ma non capivo quello che il suo agente mi andava dicendo. È straniero?». Montalbano preferì sorvolare.

Di una data cosa la lingua ne esprime il concetto, mentre della medesima cosa il dialetto ne esprime il sentimento.

Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing it's realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed to control perception itself. [...] The world is his because he has named everything in it, including her. She uses this language against herself because it cannot be used any other way.

I used writing to take language where women's pain was--and women's fear--and I kept excavating for the words that could bear the burden of speaking the unspeakable...

Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct relationship to experience, ideas, literature, life, including fucking, without mediation-such that what she says and how she says it are not determined by boundaries men have set for her?

who says dog means dog?

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

Then he read the first sentence from the introduction: Without question this modern American dictionary is one of the most surprisingly complex and profound documents ever to be created, for it embodies unparalleled etymological detail, reflecting not only superb lexicographic scholarship, but also the dreams and speech and imaginative talents of millions of people over thousands of years—for every person who has ever spoken or written in English has had a hand in its making.

That was the second thing—understanding what Mrs. Granger had said.

Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life.