Quotes About Language

All plays are implicitly political by virtue of the subject-matter, form, and linguistic registers they contain, and the audience for whom they are intended; all productions are implicitly political because the resources they consume are denied to another play, company and space.

Books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it's full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.

Müller's theory of myth was actually based on the notion of a "disease of language," the idea that language itself was inadequate to express everything it had to and therefore was a major contributor to the development of gods and myths, which grew out of linguistic confusion.

Most runic inscriptions are utilitarian, and despite popular conceptions, they have little to say about mythology or magic.

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

When ideas float in our mind without any reflection or regard of the understanding, it is that which the French call revery, our language has scarce a name for it.

And when a countryman says the cold freezes water, though the word freezing seems to import some action, yet truly it signifies nothing, but the effect, videlicet that water, that was before fluid, is become hard and consistent, without containing any idea of the action whereby it is done.

To speak less learnedly, and more intelligibly

not by the force of arguments and opposition, but by the intricacy of the words

Even cannibals don't like to be called cannibals.

I've come to realize, however, that while technology may make it more convenient to communicate, it doesn't improve our ability to get a point across.

There is a common language, a mode of consciousness, almost a secret sign which can be read and recognized by all who are similarly engaged. Such realizations help fend off the feeling of isolation which can dog the steps of those who seek the Grail.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

In living organisms, nucleic acid molecules are the only indefinite hereditary replicators, or at least they were until the invention of language and music.

At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c***!

If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral. John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. "Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce.

All the things we say. And how little of all the words even touch any reality. Or perhaps they all do if we knew it

The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids' linguistic abilities become

As always, there are exceptions. Adults with training can still learn to distinguish speech sounds in other languages. But in general, the brain appears to have a limited window of opportunity in an astonishingly early time frame. The cognitive door begins swinging shut at 6 months old, and then, unless something pushes against it, the door closes. By 12 months, your baby's brain has made decisions that affect her the rest of her life.

learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which said that the language you spoke affected how you processed reality.

At a newsstand, Owen read a German newspaper while Vivie and I paged through the Hungarian fashion magazines, and discussed how the models looked less tormented than models in American magazines. "Maybe it's like how, in cultures where everyone is starving, the standard of beauty is less skinny," Vivie said. We both looked for a moment at the confident Hungarian women, each of whom knew tens of thousands of the words closest to Ivan.

I felt every level, graphemic, morphological, and semantic, and they all hurt.

How is it we don't create new words when we see something that astonishes us? Why don't we make up new words for the things that make us feel new?

an interrobang is an unorthodox combination of question mark and exclamation point. How did this happen?!!!???