Quotes About Language

Metaphor, Evie thought as she stepped off the curb as the light changed, was for the young. Or, at any rate, for the younger than she.

Words are nothing but clothes.....The body in love has always been clothed by words that try to conceal. You can't suppress or conceal by concealing, he said.

Bombers flew above the wattles, over an England filled with songs of linnets and thrush. There were things being broken we had no American names for.

This is a conjuring trick, enabling Fitzgerald to have it both ways. The insufficiency of language becomes, in his hands, not a tragedy of human inarticulacy, but a romance of possibility.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power.

Le propre d'une métaphore, c'est d'être réelle

Happiness begins to deteriorate once it is named.

I knew I couldn't replicate my whole life in language.

Another friend said, I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them. The goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect.

I gave up on cussing - I'd run out of words filthy enough - and just started praying.

Magic is all about metaphors.

Why was it that people said "no offense" before going on to say something clearly offensive?

I think maybe heaven is a sea of untranslatable jokes. Only everyone is laughing.

Once the language was in the actors' minds, and their bodies were freed from blocking, and in relationship to real architecture, they became virtuosic. Metaphor suddenly had a more intimate relationship with reality. The actor was real, the staircase was real, the emotion was real, and the language floated on top.    

It shows the truth - that the real meaning of a word is only as powerful or harmless as the emotion behind it.

In Wangechi Mutu's mother tongue, Kikuyu, there is no word for "artist." The closest term is something like "magician" or "a person who uses objects and imbues them with meaning and power,

To forget words, common words, because your habits are so narrow you need only know a hundred hard phrases—stone, soup, comb, Bible, needle, dark, prisoner, walk, stand still, look sharp, look sharp!

She began to teach herself Esperanto, reciting phrases as she polished and swept.

Words, hmm? They seduce us in darkness, and the mind clothes and fashions them to fashions of its own.

Ones language is a spiritual location. It houses your soul. If you were born in America all essential communication, your deepest conversations with yourself, will be in English. ... Your English is the principal instrument of your humanity.

A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form that frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities?

Mark Twain once put it, "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." Power

As Mark Twain once put it, "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.