Quotes About Language

What unknown abilities had filled this void? Was the world somehow brighter, more tangible, without the nagging interference of language? Was the absence of words actually a form of freedom? I've often tried to quiet that constant voice in my mind, to try to experience the world the way they might—but always the questions rush in faster than I can carve out a moment of true silence.

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.

You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind

What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.

knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish

There was a poem with that mood by Pasternak: "Don't sleep, don't sleep, artist." It sounded better in Russian, because the word for "artist" had three syllables, it was an amphibrach, like "spaghetti," or "appendix." Don't sleep, don't sleep, gorilla, I thought as I went down the elevator to the subway platform.

I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.

Everyone reacted differently to being spoken to in a language they didn't understand. Katya got quiet and scared. Ivan leaned forward with an amused expression. Grisha narrowed his eyes and nodded in a manner suggesting the dawn of comprehension. Boris, a bearded doctoral student, rifled guiltily through his notes like someone having a nightmare that he was already supposed to speak Russian.

At the first such gathering, I politely sat with them for half an hour, drank some vodka, and even recited a toast about how great it was that Gulya had such great friends. This proved to be a tactical error, since afterward Gulya wanted me to drink vodka and recite toasts with them every night, which was not compatible with my program of study of the great Uzbek language.

The story had a stilted feel, and yet while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn't name didn't exist.

Spiderwebs attached themselves, like long trails of agglutinative suffixes, onto our arms and faces.

When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn't take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn't learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn't learned anything at all.

There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making only factual statements about direct observations. You were forced to use -mi?, just by the human condition—just by existing in relation to other people.

In the end I signed up for a different Spanish film seminar, taught in Spanish, by an adjunct instructor. The adjunct instructor also said stupid things, but they were in Spanish, so you learned more.

When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn't take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn't learned what I wanted to about how language worked. I hadn't learned anything at all.

The Other," I repeated, to buy time. I was pretty sure that the Other was a French construct having something to do with either sex or colonialism. "That's

I realized that I would never have corrected somebody who said "you can feel the food." That was how Owen would end up with students who said "savor," while I would end up with students who said "papel iss blonk.

But I was in Russia because I had looked at the literatures of the world and made a choice.

I had a vocal coach. It's a sad thing, but I had to hire someone so that I could get my Australian accent back.

the phrase "stay-at-home mom" is patronizing and faintly derogatory, like "stick-in-the-mud mom" or "sit-in-the-corner mom." Do we talk about a "chained-to-the-desk mom" or a "stuck-in-traffic mom" or a "languishing-in-meetings mom"?

On language—from the mother tongue came our father's sins.

Words are a means to an end. Those who chase after them inevitably fail to reach that end.