Quotes About Language

He has something we don't have, he has the word.

Becka said that spelling was not reading. Reading, she said, was when you could hear the words as if they were a song.

Words are so often like window curtains, a decorative screen put up to keep the neighbours at a distance.

Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble.

Hang on to the words, he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

one of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring.

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary —the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch

Do you know what it came from? said Luke. Mayday? It's French, he said. From m'aidez. Help me.

It's French, he said. From m'aidez. Help me.

the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar.

They put the picture in the window when they have something, take it away when they don't. Sign language.

Charis disapproves of crass words like shit. Roz has offered poop , but Charis rejected it as too babyish. Her alimentary canal products? Tony has suggested. No, that sounds too coldly intellectual, said Charis. Her Gifts to the Earth.

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described

Language is not morally neutral because the human brain is not neutral in its desires. Neither is the dog brain. Neither is the bird brain: crows hate owls. We like some things and dislike others, we approve of some things and disapprove of others. Such is the nature of being an organism.

Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

know what you mean, we'd say. Or, a quaint expression you sometimes hear, still, from older people: I hear where you're coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveler, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is.

All that speech-making can bloat a man up. I've watched the process, many times now. It's those kinds of words, the kind they use in speeches. They have a fermenting effect on the brain. You can see it on television, during the political broadcasts - the words coming out of their mouths like bubbles of gas.

I take back what you have stolen, and in your languages I announce I am now nameless. My true name is a growl.

Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense.

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From

how outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?

Poems are made of words. They aren't boxes. They aren't houses. Nobody is in them, really.

Words," he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocussed, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, "are beginning to lose their meanings.

The personal is not political, thinks Tony: the personal is military. War is what happens when language fails.