Quotes About Language

I began to understand that poetry did not have to be ... of an English that was always lonesome for its homeland in Europe.

We make ceremony with words even as our words can lead us to the hells of destruction.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted? If it were not for language, could we lie?

A female is essentially a cunt, the pure purpose of the female is cunt, but a woman, a wife, is a cunt with a mouth, a man has to reckon with. It's a sobering fact: you start off with a cunt, you wind up with mouth. You wind up with your widow-to-be.

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

Because we are linked by blood and blood is memory without language.

The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for 'serious literary' fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.

These were no-man's-lands, limbos of a sort, places where language did not prevail and the only protection was flight, if you could run fast enough; or submission if you couldn't.

Though words sometimes puzzled Alma, she never looked up any word in any dictionary; a word was like a pebble to be turned briefly in the hand, and tossed away, with no expectation that it would be encountered again.

Our words contain the power of life and death.

Words kill, words give life; they're either poison or fruit—you choose.

Corinthians 14:15

words are powerful and should not be spoken frivolously.

Achieve" comes before "Believe" in the dictionary, but the order is switched in real life.

Our Words Are Seeds

Good words are worth much, and cost little. —George Herbert

Me di cuenta que su voz estaba hecha de hebras humanas, que su boca tenía dientes y una lengua que se trababa y destrababa al hablar, y que sus ojos eran como todos los ojos de la gente que vive sobre la tierra.

Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.

We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both "what" we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences.

Es gibt kein Ich vor der Annahme eines Geschlechts.

El "sexo", la categoría, obliga al "sexo", la configuración social de los cuerpos, a través de lo que Wittig denomina un contrato forzoso. Así pues, la categoría de "sexo" es un nombre que esclaviza. El lenguaje "arroja manojos de realidad sobre el cuerpo social", pero estos manojos no se desechan con facilidad y añade: al formarlo y configurarlo de forma violenta.

Hence, it is not that one cannot get outside of language in order to grasp materiality in and of itself; rather, every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in its phenomenality, is always already material. In this sense, then, language and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and refers to that which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified.

See? I can read between the lies of the lines of the writing on the wail.