Quotes About Language

Lucifer's name means light and the reason they threw him out of heaven and he became the biggest devil and not the biggest saint anymore was what he did with language.

How to put this feeling, this certainty, into something as limited as words?

The sugar was back in Lila Ann Price's voice, but it sounded a little bit like artificial sweetener.

Why? Oh, Holy Cow!" I groaned. "Please not to use these ridiculous expressions," he exploded in exasperation. "I have never heard any other Americans use them except those—what do you call them—those cartoon animals. Mickey Mouse." "Micky Mice," I said firmly.

Angela has a boyfriend. Actually, he's a friend with benefits." "What's that?" Grandma said. "It means she likes him, and she sleeps with him sometimes when she feels like it." "In my day, we called that a husband," Grandma said.

Boyfriend. This is such a weird word. There's no good word about someone if you're not married. Even calling a guy you live with your boyfriend makes you sound eleven years old. Old man? If you're not living with Willie Nelson, that one doesn't work, either.

If you can't answer a man's arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.

Grammar is the grave of letters.

If you cannot answer a man's argument, all it not lost; you can still call him vile names.

If you can not answer a man's argument, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.

Homosexualidad.] La palabra me desagrada. No me gusta el hecho de que su formación sea irregular, y siempre he considerado que apesta a ciencia y a intelecto. Preferiría una palabra que oliera a vida corriente. (...) Sus raíces pertenecen a dos lenguas distintas: "Homo", que en griego significa "igual" y "sexual" que procesde de la palabra latiana para "sexo". Alguien la acuñó en el esiglo XIX y no logro imaginar en qué estaba pensando.

Don't call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it's not sexist.

Maybe, I thought, I've given too much weight to the cultivated use of reason, to good reading, to well controlled language, to political affiliation; maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.

Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.

Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

Parole: con quelle si fa e si disfa come si vuole.

I now knew a method of speaking and writing that—by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn't supposed to fail—sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.

I was enchanted. Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my mother's lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can't take you anymore, I can't take any more. Commands, shouts, insults, life stretching into her words, as when a frayed nerve is just touched, and the pain scrapes away all self-control.

Translators transport nations into other nations. They are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation. It draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

But I've always had a low voice, I can't yell, the words fall a short distance away like a handful of pebbles thrown by a child.

He had rid himself so fiercely of memory, language, the capacity to find meaning that it seemed obvious the hatred he had for himself, for his own skin, for his moods, for his thoughts and words, for the brutal corner of the world that had enveloped him.

Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my mother's lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can't take you anymore, I can't take any more.

No, words rarely go to the right place, and if they do, it's only for a very brief time. Otherwise they're useful for speaking nonsense, as now. Or for pretending that everything is under control." "Pretending? You who have always kept everything under control, you were pretending?" "Why not? It's unavoidable to pretend a little.

It occurred to me that it was now a linguistic question. She resorted to Italian as if to a barrier; I tried to push her toward dialect, our language of candor. But while her Italian was translated from dialect, my dialect was increasingly translated from Italian, and we both spoke a false language. She needed to explode, lose control of the words.