Quotes About Language

Unlike Maxine Kumin, I never learned to pay the syntax.

Love this quotation I just read: "Ciao," the girl said. Fuck you, ciao. Ciao was the way Katherine and her friends said good-bye and it always struck her as a perfect symbol of their attempts to be what they weren't.

This is why many people find performances of Shakespeare incomprehensible, because the actors are playing the poetry instead of letting the lines mean something and playing the situation.

Apparently an aesthetic sense is instinctual. Just as the beauty of a rose exceeds its function in attracting insects to spread pollen, so human skill always flowers in excess, producing beauty beyond need. Nature is not hardheaded, hardhearted, mechanical, pratical, or economical. Neither are we. Our simplest and most practical acts, including the use of language, are likely to be infused with grace and elaboration wich utilitarian purposes cannot explain

That's not a bad word . . . hate and war are bad words but fuck isn't.

Dingleberry: a small clot of dung, as clinging to the hindquarters of an animal.

That's not a bad word... hate and war are bad words, but fuck isn't.

The best way to learn a foreign language is to fuck interesting foreigners.

A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. … Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

It's funny how "a part" and "apart" are complete opposites, yet only differ by a little space.

Since language is community, if the cognitive ecology of a language is altered, so is the community.

the Howard speech is a prime example of what Moynihan calls "semantic infiltration."20 This term refers to the appropriation of the language of one's political opponents for the purpose of blurring distinctions and molding it to one's own political position.

We can't be direct, so we end up saying the weirdest things.

Buenos dias ," she said in response to Hernandez's soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.

like the discomforts of a camping trip that become hilarious in the telling, the verbal formulation of distress has the capacity to cure it.

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

Money is a kind of poetry.

The essential gaudiness of poetry.

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.