Quotes About Language

it seemed to me that I had mastered words to the point of sweeping away forever the contradictions of being in the world, the surge of emotions, and breathless speech. In short, 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.

Le parole vanno raramente al posto giusto, e solo per un tempo brevissimo. Per il resto servono a parlare a vanvera, come adesso. O a fingere che sia tutto sotto controllo.

Los libros se escriben para hacerse oír, no para quedarse callados.

She expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, the confusion of the oral.

se sentiu humilhada por ter passado a vida atribuindo um poder a coisas que, nas hierarquias ordinárias, contavam muito pouco: o alfabeto, a escrita, os livros.

Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.

She talked to the child and her doll in the pleasing cadence of the Neapolitan dialect that I love, the tender language of playfulness and sweet nothings. 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.

Non basta conoscere l'alfabeto, pensò, le difficoltà sono tante.

I am therefore Italian, completely and with pride. But if I could, I would descend into all languages and let myself be permeated by them all. Even the terrible Google Translate consoles me. We can be much more than what we happen to be.

laborious filters of Italian pronunciation

No había podido callarse la boca, la amistad entre hombres tiene pactos no escritos pero sólidos, no como la amistad entre mujeres.

words rarely go to the right place, and if they do, it's only for a very brief time.

Palabras, con ellas se hace y se deshace a voluntad.

Literary work couldn't seriously force the whirlpool of debris that constituted the real into any grammatical or syntactical order.

As a girl I had liked obscene language, it gave me a sense of masculine freedom. Now I knew that obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled as mine. So I closed my eyes, I held my hands and squeezed my eyelids.

Dealings with the world, yes, at any time they are entirely ours. But the words--the written form in which we enclose them, attentive to the red margins of our notebooks--are not. We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing. Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned.

A language is a compendium of the history, geography, material and spiritual life, the vices and virtues, not only of those who speak it, but also of those who have spoken it through the centuries. The words, the grammar, the syntax are a chisel that shapes our thought.

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.

Je reste convaincue que « je te hais » possède une force et une honnêteté sentimentale que n'a pas « je te hais !!! ». Dans l'écriture au moins, il faudrait éviter de faire comme ces fous qui gouvernent le monde et qui menacent, trafiquent, traitent et, quand ils gagnent, exultent, en truffant leurs discours de ces minuscules missiles à tête nucléaire qui concluent chacune de leurs misérables phrases.

Há momentos em que recorremos a palavras insensatas e fazemos exigências absurdas para esconder sentimentos lineares.

Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.

The world, I remember feeling rather than thinking, is the same everywhere: families sleeping and eating under one roof, speaking in different languages but about more or less the same things.

El contenido político no se lo daban las palabras sino las actitudes. Yo ya no creo en las palabras. Los priístas usan un lenguaje revolucionario, emplean términos muy avanzados, y sin embargo un campesino, si palabras, sin lenguaje, con su sola actitud, es más revolucionario que todos nosotros juntos. Pablo Gómez, estudiante de la Escuela de Economía de la UNAM y de las Juventudes Comunistas

Los priístas usan un lenguaje revolucionario, emplean términos muy avanzados, y sin embargo un campesino, sin palabras, sin lenguaje, con su sola actitud, es más revolucionario que todos nosotros juntos. Pablo Gómez, estudiante de la Escuela de Economía de la UNAM y de las Juventudes Comunistas.