Quotes About Language

I am ashamed of my long letters to you, but I am such a murderer of language that I have to use it all to tell anything.

Poetry is that which is worth translating. The poem dies when it has no place to go.

Chinese prosody is largely concerned with the number of characters per line and the arrangement of tones - both of which are untranslatable. But translators tend to rush in where wise men never, tread, and often may be seen attempting to nurture Chinese rhyme patterns in the hostile environment of Western language.

Expressing emotion is not so easy. He has to remind himself that English is not her first language. Expressing emotion can be difficult even when the words are familiar. 

The human face is the organic seat of beauty. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.

And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

The great chasm between the thing I say, & the thing I would say, wd be quite dispiriting to me, in spite even of such kindnesses as yours, if the desire did not master the despondency.

It is the nature of the human mind to convey its own character to whatever substance it conveys, whether it convey metaphysical impressions from itself to another mind, or literary compositions from one to another language.

And all this reminds me of what you once asked me about the inscriptions in Lord Brougham's villa at Nice. There are probably as many different dialects for the heart as for the tongue, are there not?...

A world of complexity in that syllable.

He made a noise she recognized, one that meant he was organizing whatever multidimensional information lattices inhabited his mental space into linear strings amenable to transmission through that inadequate medium, language.

I didn't know a computer could sound bitter.

It felt-it felt like the Ativahikas had, when they spoke to me. As if something were inside me, vast and ancient and yet somehow still a part of me, or containing me, speaking from the halls of my own being. Speaking in a language deeper than any I had ever had to learn.

I had no idea that there were that many filthy insults available to the average speaker of Galactic Standard.

Be careful what you name a thing.

All the words I can find are stupid words, pointless ones.

He had never been able to name things himself-he was, after all, in chief a sort of archivist-but as with many archivists, a good irony and a pun delighted him.

It was a relief to speak his native tongue, familiar words and known patterns that had settled into his bones with father's milk and rooted deep.

Behind him, a woman's voice rises, fluid and mellifluous on words he does not understand, until Will pushed himself upright with both hands flat on the dew and got his feet under him in a crouch.

There was, as far as Garrett understood, no actual reason why incantations were in Latin or Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew, other than tradition and mystique. But she found the discipline useful.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

and Matchett, who was as strong as a nigger

made articulate seemed to