Quotes About Language

I think music is what language once aspired to be. Music allows us to face God on our own terms because it reaches beyond life.

I think I should learn French and be a better cook - basic, really good life stuff.

Take care what words you speak that follow "I am." In so speaking you create your life.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

WOMAN, n. An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication.

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.

Within five years, he had learned English and become the greatest bodybuilder in the world.

Truth lives in the spaces between words. It defies translation.

When I'm drafting right to life language, I don't call up the nuns.

All life is profoundly dependent on communication.

I think hip hop should be a living word. And what I mean by the living word is like yo, you gotta have the words that provide life.

Other potentially misleading terms include "cosmology" and "psychology." In

As with the terms "physics" and "science," so too with terms like "cosmology" and "psychology," the wisest policy is, in my view, not to quibble about contemporary usage but rather to use the best modern labels, qualify them as one sees fit, and then to get on with matters of substance.

We can only understand what we can name.

Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare.

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language.

Poetry is a form of necessary speech.

Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, and the lyric poem exists somewhere in the region—the register—between speech and song.

Writing fixes the evanescence of sound and holds it against death.

Explicitly connecting how people describe the natural world in different ways is a top conservation priority.

Of all the Arts, writing, perhaps, shows most clearly the formative force of the instruments used.

iTranslate by Sonico Mobile iTranslate is a great free app that does language translation. If you're a student of languages or you do a lot of international travel, you'll definitely want to have this one on your Kindle Fire. The app does a magnificent job of combining voice recognition with voice output, so you can speak and see your language. The app will translate words, phrases, and entire sentences into any one of more than 50 languages.

We are a biological species arising from Earth's biosphere as one adapted species among many; and however splendid our languages and cultures, however rich and subtle our minds, however vast our creative powers, the mental process is the product of a brain shaped by the hammer of natural selection upon the anvil of nature.