Quotes About Language

Click here' is not a call to action, because I will only take action with a reason, and clicking is no reason. Remove the 'Click here' from any link, and it will be clearer and more direct. (The only time I ever use 'Click here' is when it is not at all obvious that the target is clickable, which should never really happen.)

Language reveals the man. Speak that I may see thee.

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.

Talking is the disease of age.

Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.

I was born Moishe Ketzelbourd but the Indians call me Maurice Cougar.

When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.

I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.

The fatal problem with poetry: poems.

we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them.

The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media," I said, meaninglessly.

there were eighty or so people gathered to listen to this utter shit as though it were their daily language passing through the crucible of the human sprint and emerging purified, redeemed.

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former

Poetry isn't hard, it's impossible.

What I knew as much by instinct as by training was that when a boy like Jacob shows up in your cramped but light-filled office, you should not under any circumstances ask him to account for his behavior[...] Jacob would be the last person capable of such an account; if he had the language he wouldn't express himself with symptoms.

There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative.

the more profound the statement, the more reversible; the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed, just as there is no principle of noncontradiction, no law of excluded middle, governing the unconscious. Then, briefly serious, Klaus would touch my shoulder: A quote like that can save your life.

If he had the language, he wouldn't express himself with symptoms.

The myth of Aryan dominance, initially an attempt to trace the lost language of the Aryas, began as a set of undemonstrable racial assumptions, and ended in a colossal, perfectly unscientific lie: "I decide who is Jewish and who is Aryan," announced Goebbels. That is what the Nazis meant by natural selection.

Spelling a person's name is the first step toward killing him. It takes him apart and empties him of meaning. This is why God is afraid to have his name spelled.

When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself.

James shows his feelings so liberally that they come at a discount, and their value diminishes. When he says he loves me, usually in a threatening way, the statement always seems to beg for reciprocation. I guess he cries wolf. More or less sobs it. One could argue that everything James says is merely the word "wolf" in one language or another.

The sign red "Sky and Celery." Closer, it read "Ski and Cyclery.

Baby talk has tremendous potential, despite its obvious dangers and its near-total incomprehensibility. The only reason you don't embrace it is your abject terror.