Quotes About Language

But no jagged simile, no disjointed paragraph can come close to describing real pain. Pain is its own language. Each description feels false, decorative, like I'm pouring watercolors into the crater of a bomb site (see, I'm failing even now).

Actions may be judged according to time and place, and their values may change; but style, language (apart from content) are crystallized at the moment.

I hope it means I'll know things other cats don't." "Like what?" Mischief lit his gaze. "How to speak to Twolegs?" "Don't be stupid!

Sin embargo, ese fue su programa estético de los años veinte: construir una lengua literaria para Buenos Aires y darle, al mismo tiempo, una dimensión mítica a la ciudad.

El proceso y las condiciones históricas de enunciación modifican todos los enunciados. El sentido es un efecto frágil (y no sustancial) relacionado con la enunciación: emerge en la actividad de escribir-leer y no está enlazado a las palabras sino a los contextos de las palabras… No hay modo de que un texto sea idéntico a su doble.

In all his imaginings, he had never envisioned her crying. He knew that her son had died, but he'd never expected that her pain might be anything he could recognize, almost as though he believed that Negroes had their own special kind of grieving ritual, another language, something other than tears they used to express their sadness.

Madan is to me the most extraordinary person in this story, because he didn't know me at all. He didn't know my family, and he has his own family, for whom he is the sole provider. We were separated by language, by culture, by religion, by the entire breadth of this world, but bound together by a bond of common humanity. This man will never have to wonder again whether he has a brave heart.

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.

All I say cancels out, I'll have said nothing.

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

Literalness, however, is not the substance from which human culture is made.

That I was a writer was further proof of God's far-sightedness; she was convinced that by some magic of propinquity she would acquire a mastery of the English language.

I haven't seen her since. I wrote to her a few times, not really expecting an answer, for—as she often used to say—the tongue is longer than the pen and can lead you straight to Kiev.

I'm Jessica Proot," I said, self-consciously releasing her hand. "Dzhesica?" she savored the awkward name doubtfully. "I call you Lapochka, for small." "What does it mean?" I asked. "Means: hand of cat." "Of cat?

Apparently this r had to be worked for: Varya told me that as a child she couldn't pronounce it properly, and that her father would make her repeat a series of exercises about gorgeous grapes growing on Mount Ararat and three hundred thirty-three drummers drumming on three hundred thirty-three drums.

The high desert landscape of New Mexico is a sparse terrain, bearing the trace of stories long forgotten. It's a good place to study the parlance of wind and flowing water, to ponder ravens on the wing and the play of shadows among the rocks. The land here cuts through you like a knife, enticing you to relinquish one trusted language for another- or for none at all.

I shoulder my pack and hit the trail, realizing I'm being called to a memory deeper than my own, to a language my body has known all along. The desert speaks- out of lifetimes of patience and pain-with a subtle but insistent voice. My role in the Great Conversation isn't finally to understand, only to listen and love.

Poet W.S. Merwin once mused that in order to adequately describe the forests of eastern Pennsylvania where he grew up, he'd "have to speak in a forgotten language." He was aware that a shift in consciousness is necessary for certain forms of communication and that it's easy to lose ancient languages we've long ceased to practice. How, then, do we speak of the languages that we may need in renewing the Great Conversation?

I prefer the word homemaker, because housewife always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.

I prefer the word "homemaker" because "housewife" always implies that there might be a wife someplace else.

David Lusterman's opinions. He spoke in the universal language

Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have left the vulgar stuff alone.

I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.