Quotes About Language

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Everybody heard the gospel in their own language: you have a place.

She walks to a table She walk to table She is walking to a table She walk to table now What difference does it make What difference it make In Nature, no completeness No sentence really complete thought Language, like woman, Look best when free, undressed.

it was easy to forget that Washington was just another glum city of government, like Albany or Sacramento, legislators and lobbyists and bureaucrats and their clerks working and reworking the sodden language of government in order to distribute the spoils.

If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what an abridgment it would make of speech! And what an unraveling there would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now weave about each other!

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use

The tongue is the only instrument that gets sharper with use.

He never even talked of love; but there are modes of making it more eloquent than language, and which convey it subtilely and irresistibly to the heart. The beam of the eye, the tone of voice, the thousand tendernesses which emanate from every word and look and action - these form the true eloquence of love, and can always be felt and understood, but never described.

what is it to know a variety of languages, but merely to have a variety of sounds express the same idea? Original thought is ore of the mind; language is but the stamp and coinage by which it is put into circulation.

The language, of course, is quaint and antiquated, so that the beauty of many of its golden phrases will scarcely be perceived at the present day, but it is impossible not to be charmed with the genuine sentiment, the delightful artlessness and urbanity, which prevail throughout it. The descriptions of Nature too, with which it is embellished, are given with a truth, a discrimination, and a freshness, worthy of the most cultivated periods of the art.

Did you find your shit? You've got to watch the mota Thurston, your fuckin' memory just goes out the window.

I am demonstrating to you how tasty I think words are. I'm having sex with words in front of you. I'm playing around with them. I'm getting off. I'm trying to titillate you. There's this magical substance, language, that I'm laying out for you. Then you're going to fondle it.

If you care about words you learn quite early in life that it is evil to lie.

Listeners love when opera dethrones or kills language; the regicide, on these occasions, is the revolutionary, pleasure-seeking, penetrated, tickled ear. Opera theory tells us that words master music, but we, in our secret hearts, know music's superiority; and this destruction of language, this reversal of hierarchy, makes opera a fit object for the enthusiasms of sex-and-gender dissidents.

Yes to fingerfucking the dialectic! Or to using the dialectic as a method of fingerfucking the binary!

Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us.

Poetry can be written only because it has been written.

The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.

Norway ~ Both Roald Dahl's parents were from Norway. They spoke Norwegian to each other, and Roald and his sisters learned Norwegian before English. Roald visited Norway many times and took his own family there for holidays. They spent their time boating, fishing, snorkeling, and visiting a never-ending stream of Norwegian relatives. Do you know what this says? Jeg er en Roald Dahl vifte.

many priests and scholars can speak Sanskrit, but no one ever spoke only pure Sanskrit.

It must have been the case that the natural language, Prakrit, and the vernaculars came first, while Sanskrit, the refined, secondary revision, the artificial language, came later.

But Sanskrit, the language of power, emerged in India from a minority, and at first its power came precisely from its nonintelligibility and unavailability, which made it the power of an elite group.

The Guptas' use of Sanskrit and patronage of Sanskrit literature also contributed to the Euro-American identification of their age as classical.