Quotes About Language

Greek, a language in which everything is pronounced exactly as written

If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation.

Our galaxy is called the Milky Way, and both it and the word "galaxy" have their origins in the Greek word for milk, gala.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND QUENTIN FIORE, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967

A person's name is a fate-conjuring incantation.

Why do you think I'm obsessed with this idea of giving the world an alphabet-soup enema?' (This was our code language for wanting to be a writer.) After a very long, Viennese pause, he said, 'Why do you think you are?' And I said, 'I don't know...Prolonged exposure to radiation from violent events in deep space?

being articulate is not a facility of language but a fidelity to vision. And so we are all articulate when finding the courage to say what we see.

When writing a sentence or phrase, ask yourself if you've ever heard or read it before. If you have, it's a cliché. Get rid of it.

Multiculturalism is really a suicide cult conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own. And that's particularly unworthy of the British, whose language, culture, and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world.

The famous United Nations statistic from a 2002 report—more books are translated into Spanish in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand—suggests at the very minimum an extraordinarily closed world.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. [ Mark Twain, a Biography ]

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

When I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English. I thought that "hat," say, was the real and actual name of the thing, but that people in other countries, who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers, might use the word "ibu," say, to designate not merely the concept hat, but the English word "hat.

All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.

Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls.

People whose parents were perhaps illiterate read strangers' eyes—you can watch them read yours—and learn what they need to know. It does not take long. They understand that grand coincidence brings us together, upright and within earshot, in this flickering generation of human life on this durable planet—common language or not, sale or no sale—and therefore to mark the occasion we might as well have a little cigarette.

Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out to be for French, that there is no key, that "oui" will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.

The line of words feels for cracks in the firmament.

El que no es consciente de su lengua, no encuentra su identidad. La lengua es un importante lugar de encuentro de la identidad.