Quotes About Language

Even now, after a lifetime of human companionship, I am hard-pressed to understand fully mankind's fascination with those little marks that they so carefully impress on sheets of paper.

Ils prirent un bateau pour traverser le lac. L'autre rive était suisse. Laurie fut assez déçue ; la Suisse ne différait en rien de l'Autriche. L'architecture y était la même, et les gens parlaient allemand.

I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

Poetry transcends the nation-state. Poetry transcends government. It brings the traditional concept of power to its knees. I have always believed poetry to be an eternal conversation in which the ancient poets remain contemporary, a conversation inviting us into other languages and cultures even as poetry transcends language and culture, returning us again and again to primal rhythms and sounds.

I was glad I'd remembered to shucksify my vocabulary in the company of children.

But aside from Willy's skill at learning another language which his father did not know enough to appreciate, his only distinction in schooling was mathematics. Numbers came easily to him. And it was not just simple mathematics but anything that was curious. Many nights in bed he pondered numbers.

Motherhood," she says, "despite being immensely common, remains the greatest mystery, and all the language people use to describe it, kitschy words like 'comfort' and 'loving arms' and 'nursing,' is to convince women to stay put.

I get enraged at the tyranny of text." "What's that?" "You know. Left to right. Punctuation. Page 1, page 2, page 3.

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!

Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.

And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.

If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.

A Babylonish dialectWhich learned pedants much affect.

For all a rhetorician's rulesTeach nothing but to name his tools.

For rhetoric, he could not opeHis mouth, but out there flew a trope.

Beside, 'tis known he could speak GreekAs naturally as pigs squeak:That Latin was no more difficileThan to a blackbird 'tis to whistle.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

Words are clothes that thoughts wear

Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.

As there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere.