Quotes About Language

It is not easy to express the inexpressible

It is not easy to express the inexpressible, he answered with a laugh.

Rache, is the German for 'revenge;' so don't lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.

I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.

On the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking. She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried," she said, "was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.

I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world; I was almost halfway past the fence.

oh, meine Güte! Ich dachte, ich weiß, was ich sagen wollte, aber ich sage es sehr schlecht.

Use all the tools at your disposal. The language is infinitely flexible, and your use of it should be completely deliberate. Never forget the grotesque effect of the absolutely wrong words.

Now I want to say something about words artificially weighted; you can, and frequently must, make a word carry several meanings or messages in your story if you use the word right. This is a kind of shorthand.

our human language is full of indications of how much dogs mean to us.somebody who is not favored to win is anunderdog a book that's well worn is dog-eared and why is a bitch the most humiliating thing you can call a woman?

You know what they say: a woman was made with nine measures of talk.

For instance, if the biblical Hebrew says: "And he said," the Aramaic says: "And he saith.

Once the custom was for a bankrupt to leave town, but that's no longer in vogue. It's not even called bankruptcy any more. The expression is, "I'm in arrears." In plain language that means, "Kiss my rear.

An utshebe zavadyenye may be out of the question, but there's not a barishnye who wouldn't like to be znakome with Zola, Pushkin, or dazhe Gorky …" So she says to me, my beauty, half in Yiddish and half in Russian, although the Russian was more like two-thirds.

It's no picnic, your Russian grammar; you have to mind your p's and q's.

No, I'm saying those Yankees are messing things up again. No respectable Southern woman would ever say a girl was Rosewell's 'power mower.' For heaven's sake. That's ridiculous. But those Yankees have tin ears. On language alone we should have won the war." She looked at us. "The woman called that floozy his paramour. But some Yankee messed it up. Paramour. Power mower. You hear the difference?" Wally glanced at me. She was

The word 'actress' or 'authoress' always struck me as condescending. A doctor's a doctor, right? So I've always referred to 'actors' and 'writers,' regardless of their sex.

Just remember,' Mary told the children, 'when someone has an accent, it means that he knows one more language than you do

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair;

With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.

The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.

The dream-thoughts and the dream-content lie before us like two versions of the same content in two different languages, or rather, the dream-content looks to us like a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, and we are supposed to get to know its signs and laws of grammatical construction by comparing the original and the translation.