Quotes About Language

Sometimes you linger days upon a word, a single, uncontaminated drop of sound; for days it trembles, liquid to the mind, then falls: mere denotation dimming the undertow of language.

Nothing seems more beautiful to me than language when it creats the impression of order.

As I say at the beginning of my workshops, 'Everything I say here is a lie -- bullshit, in other words -- because anything that you put in words is not experience, is not the experiment. It's a representation -- a misrepresentation.

It would be better to have no school at all than the schools we now have. Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play'd be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.

Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don't ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eight (October), the eleventh called the ninth (November), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?

Syntax, like government, can only be obeyed. It is therefore of no use except when you have something particular to command such as: Go buy me a bunch of carrots.

We unlearn the art of speaking well when we cease to speak with God.

The language of the Apostle well agrees with this view;   for he says that he was declared by power, because power, peculiar to   God, shone forth in him, and uncontestably proved him to be God; and   this was indeed made evident by his resurrection.

because he also is flesh.' In which language God complains, that the   order appointed by him has been so greatly disturbed, that his own   image has been transformed into flesh.   

It wasn't fair that men got the verbs and she ended up with adjectives. Jack plotted and squeezed and bulldozed. She was caught snooping—pathetic participle, half verb, half adjective.

Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet

The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.

Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.

Language has not the power to speak what love indites The soul lies buried in the Ink that writes

Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone.

Poets can dodge. ("Evening Primrose")

Know a man by his metaphors.

Names did have a power, if they were used in the right way.

Whenever someone uses the word 'glitch,' which means a fault of some kind in a system, you should immediately be suspicious, because it means that they don't know what it is. A technician who uses the term 'glitch' is like a doctor who tells you you're suffering from a 'thingy,' except the doctor won't tell you to go home and try turning yourself on and off again.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

There is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say something.

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.