Quotes About Language

I'm not that guy in the suit, speaking the Queen's English. I don't need to be. I've done enough. I can go on 'Newsnight' as me.

Granted, I'm someone who loves words. I've always loved poetry - so it's suited to me.

Accents are definitely one of my strong suits, and a lot of folks don't know that.

I refused to learn English for two years when we moved to London, hoping to send my family back home. It was tough, but at the same time, it has given me a sense of displacement that actually really suits the life that I'm living now.

We'd only speak Korean at home. They wouldn't let us have sleepovers and sent us away to Korean church camp during the summers. We had weird food concoctions, too, so instead of spaghetti bolognese, we had rice bolognese with kimchi.

An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.

Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

I've had a wordless phase, and that's still not entirely over: what I sing is not always literally meant that way, and you can hear that in the way it is sung.

Singing in Gaelic is very, very natural to do. I think lends itself very much so to being sung.

I don't speak Filipino or Spanish, but I've sung in both.

We all know what it means to be sung to. And poetry is very close to that.

For me, it was pretty hard to go into the studio and sing English for the first time, because I always sung in German, and we've been making music for seven years and it's always been in German.

I don't love pronouns like 'they' and 'them' because that's super confusing I think.

Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It's just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.

I'd read books in Russian, and they would take me forever. I wanted to write a book that would last and would not be superficial. Siberian-travel writing is its own genre.

Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.

I am so afraid of people's words.They describe so distinctly everything: And this they call dog and that they call house, here the start and there the end. I worry about their mockery with words, they know everything, what will be, what was; no mountain is still miraculous; and their house and yard lead right up to God. I want to warn and object: Let the things be! I enjoy listening to the sound they are making. But you always touch: and they hush and stand still. That's how you kill.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Things are not as easy to understand or express as we are mostly led to believe; most of what happens cannot be put into words and takes place in a realm which no word has ever entered.

For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.

Maybe we're here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window — at most, pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.