Quotes About Language

After a while she said, If you make a sound it's just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it's a word. It means something. It can't not mean something.

We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.

It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words.

Marilynne Robinson has written a deeply romantic love story embodied in the language and ideas of Calvinist doctrine. She really is not like any other writer. She really isn't Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Robinson has created a small, rich, and fearless body of work in which religion exists unashamedly, as does doubt, unashamedly.

There is something real signified by that word 'just' that proper language won't acknowledge. It's a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

I don't write the way I speak. I'm afraid you would think I didn't know any better. I don't write the way I do for the pulpit, either, insofar as I can help it. That would be ridiculous, in the circumstances. I do try to write the way I think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words. And the more it does seem to be my thinking, the more pulpitish it sounds, which I guess is inevitable. I will resist that inflection, nevertheless.

I think communication starts when words are not present at all. I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important.

Mind-boggling, isn't it? Centuries before the question of why mathematics was so effective in explaining nature was even asked, Galileo thought he already knew the answer! To him, mathematics was simply the language of the universe. To understand the universe, he argued, one must speak this language. God is indeed a mathematician.

One of Lindon's amusing word-unit palindromes reads: Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl. Other palindromes are symmetric with respect to back-to-front reading letter by letter-Able was I ere I saw Elba (attributed jokingly to Napoleon), or the title of a famous NOVA program: A Man, a Plan, a Canal, Panama.

The Pythagoreans were probably the first to recognize the concept that the basic forces in the universe may be expressed through the language of mathematics.

Moreover, Galileo argued that by pursuing science using the language of mechanical equilibrium and mathematics, humans could understand the divine mind.

A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression. This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words.

I discovered that the predisposition for languages is as mysterious as the inclination of certain people for mathematics or music and has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge. It is something separate, a gift that some possess and others don't.

The symbol of a setting for a Hemingway story is a boxing ring; for Borges, a library. On the other hand I think Nabokov was a writer quite close to Borges. He had the same rich literary culture, moved with great ease in different languages and traditions, and had a playful approach to literature-literature as an intellectual game, through which, of course, the real truths could appear. But apparently the game was for Nabokov just an exercise devoid of moral substance.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Él, tan educado y pulido con su vocabulario ante la gente, sentía siempre, en la intimidad de su diario, una invencible necesidad de escribir obscenidades. Por razones que no comprendía bien, la coprolalia le hacía bien

Se, all'improvviso, sentissimo che stiamo per morire e ci domandassimo: quale traccia lasceremo del nostro passaggio per questo canile?, la risposta corretta sarebbe: nessuna, non abbiamo fatto niente se non parlare per conto di altri. Che cosa significherebbe, altrimenti, aver tradotto milioni di parole d cui non ne ricordiamo neppure una, perchè nessuna meritava di essere ricordata?

la retórica y la manera como había nacido el lenguaje, la comunicación humana, quehacer al que Smith identifica no sólo por una necesidad de supervivencia sino con la propiedad y la simpatía, el don de gentes y el sentido común, pilares de la vida social y de su argamasa: la sociabilidad

Ese objeto, anodino en la realidad real, transfigurado prodigiosamente por el lenguaje, es la demostración de algo que descubrió Flaubert a los veinticuatro años y que se apresuró a participar a su amigo Le Poittevin: «Pour qu'une chose soit intéressante, il suffit de la regarder longtemps».[53]

Wij dragomans kunnen alleen maar nutteloos zijn, beste jongen,' troostte hij me. 'Maar we doen niemand kwaad met ons werk. In alle andere beroepen kun je de menselijke soort grote schade toebrengen. Denk bijvoorbeeld maar eens aan advocaten en artsen, om van architecten of politici nog maar te zwijgen.

Ocurre que el escritor latinoamericano había olvidado algo que, en cambio, nuestros clásicos, como el Inca Garcilaso o Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, jamás pusieron en duda: que era parte constitutiva, por derecho de lengua y de historia, de la cultura occidental.

El estilo borgiano es uno de los milagros estéticos del siglo que termina, un estilo que desinfló la lengua española de la elefantiasis retórica, del énfasis y la reiteración que la asfixiaban, que la depuró hasta casi la anorexia y obligó a ser luminosamente inteligente

El español, como el italiano o el portugués, es un idioma palabrero, abundante, pirotécnico, de una formidable expresividad emocional, pero, por lo mismo, conceptualmente impreciso.

Dentro de esta tradición, la prosa literaria creada por Borges es una anomalía, pues desobedece íntimamente la predisposición natural de la lengua española hacia el exceso, optando por la más estricta parquedad.