Quotes About Language

They sounded different from the mouth of a young mother than they did from the mouth of a widow. This was because the words did not come straight off the page. They percolated up through the silt and gravel of real people's lives so that the meaning in them was fluid, not fixed.

As much as I love the written word, I am aware of the ways this love removes me from the world.

The best saints swear fluently.

His quick wits, his language skills and personal knowledge of the battle arena brought him success and esteem and his abilities had not gone unremarked when, after the war, he had decided to join the police force.

What do I love most? Working with words. Words in a sentence are like pieces of a puzzle; you try out a whole bunch, then turn them this way and that until they fit into the whole. Creating flow is crucial. There's nothing like the moment when, after working and reworking a sentence, everything falls into place, and you know that it's right. What I do love least? Touring. It's grueling, time-consuming, and lonely.

Sarcasm is the language of the devil.

Sound is so important to creative writing. Think of the sounds you hear that you include and the similes you use to describe what things sound like . 'As she walked up the alley, her polyester workout pants sounded like windshield wipers swishing back and forth.' Cadence, onomatopoeia, the poetry of language are all so important. Learn all that you can about how to bring sound into your work.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

Authority seems to be nothing other than the vanishing-point of textuality. And Nature is authority whose textual origins have been forgotten.

It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

Good ideas ought not to be dressed up in bad prose.

The lesson started. We were to learn the subjunctive, and I found myself wondering whether I could take so kindly to the Portuguese now that I realized how often they seemed to use it. It seemed as if there were going to be a great many things I couldn't possibly say.

No, I'm not,' I said ungraciously, for nobody really likes to be called a dear. There is something so very faint and dull about it.

Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended.

In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.

It must always be an amazement how 18th century letter writers - even, and especially, officials - had the time and capacity to produce their sculpted sentences and perfection of grammar and mots justes , while 20th century successors can only envy the past and leave their readers painfully to pick their way through thickets of academic and the mud of bureaucratic jargon.

Marco Polo dictated his Travels in French,

A Bishop of Durham in 1318 could not understand or pronounce Latin and after struggling helplessly with the word Metropolitanus at his own consecration, muttered in the vernacular, "Let us take that word as read." Later when ordaining candidates for holy orders, he met the word aenigmate (through a glass darkly) and this time swore in honest outrage, "By St. Louis, that was no courteous man who wrote this word!

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House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.

A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence.

I love to invent words but even when I think I've invented one or a new variation on a word, I often find that someone else has already made use of it.