Quotes About Language

From Liesel's position, their voices were only sounds. Not words at all.

I think that's what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it's not a secret at all; men just don't know how to listen.

There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for content are illusioned.

Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

Jack Paar mentioned that he once had said to a young friend, "Why do you kids use 'cool' to mean 'hot'?" The friend replied, "Because you folks used up the word 'hot' before we came along.

That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which "made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible.

The secret of mastering creativity in any field is knowing how to work with metaphor without getting caught in language...

Since Henry Miller's Tropic books, of course, it has become difficult to talk sensibly about girls' c*nts.

It's a funny language, German. For one thing, everybody shouts it.

And Keith felt it again (he felt it several times a day): the tingle of license. Everyone could swear now, if they wanted to. The word *fuck* was available to both sexes. It was like a sticky toy, and it was there if you wanted it.

Demi's linguistic quirk is essentially and definingly female. It just is. Drawing in breath to denounce this proposition, women will often come out with something like, Up you! or Ballshit! For I am referring to Demi's use of the conflated or mangled catchphrase--Demi's speech-bargains: she wanted two for the price of one. The result was expressive, and you usually knew what she meant, given the context.

Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It's not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence

Aged seventy-three, he had just finished a book on the King's English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.

I really believe that languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the significations of words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding. – Leibniz

jiggery pokery – which is the ancient nomadic term for doing things with words.

I love words, that's all. And without this - (Holds up pen.) human history would fall into a black pit and there'd be almost no trace of it.

The Jews of Daghestan believed that they were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes. Their language, Tat, Tatti or Judaeo Tat, was a combination of Persian and Hebrew. They may well have been the descendants of Persian–Jewish soldiers who–in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries–were stationed in the lowlands of the Caucasus by

Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins.

Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch. Die Denkenden und Dichtenden sind die Wächter dieser Behausung. Ihr Wachen ist das Vollbringen der Offenbarkeit des Seins, insofern sie diese durch ihr Sagen zur Sprache bringen und in der Sprache aufbewahren.

When we say something about something, we make it lie there before us, which means at the same time to make it appear.

Language speaks and not the human.

Our thinking today is charged with the task to think what the Greeks have thought in an even more Greek manner.

Humans act as though we were the creators and masters of language, while in fact language remains the master of us. Perhaps it is, before all else, humankind's distortion of this relation of dominance that drives our nature into alienation.