Quotes About Language

Since words are the way we communicate experiences, truth, and situations, who should know how to use them more creatively than people who are aware of their Creator? The world cries out for imaginative people who can spell out truth in words that communicate meaningfully to people in their human situation.

An old, old formula came to mind, from back when I was very young indeed. "I am a soldier." I said it first in the language I had spoken then, then repeated myself in Sleepy's own Dejagoran dialect. "I've been distracted before. I'm still alive.

Lady muttered some very unladylike sniggen snaggen riddly rodden racklesnatzes under her breath, then

Does Logic deal with things, or is it a science of words? And the answer one gives to these questions has such far reaching implications that it controls every detail of the resulting system of philosophy.

I burst out with, "Aaron—Bear—" The names are unfamiliar on my tongue, like I've never spoken them before.

Why anybody would eat something with a name like "pulled pork" is a mystery to me.

David Hume thought that even the Tories had been so long obliged to talk "in the republican stile" that they had at length "embraced the sentiments as well as the language of their adversaries.

I would not be surprised if elephants are more intelligent than human beings. After all, their heads are larger than ours, and the fact that they do not speak might well be an indication of superiority.

A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

Sir U__ fell down from a speeding train, Which did some damage to his brain, And after that he did not know How to pronounce the letter O.

Comment, Mademoiselle? Vous appellés cela betrügen? Corriger la fortune, l'enchainer sous ses doits, etre sûr de son fait, das nenn die Deutsch betrügen? betrügen! O, was ist die deutsch Sprak für ein arm Sprak! für ein plump Sprak!

She had always called me 'you.' 'Is that you?' on the telephone, 'Can you? Will you? Do you?' so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one 'you' in the world and that was me.

There are times, aren't there, when Shakespeare is a little dull.

In a common situation, I suppose we all behave much alike and use the same words.

It helped a lot not being able to speak much French. You sound awfully truthful if you don't know the right words.

quatre cent vingt et un

I wanted her mind, now I wanted to read her thoughts, but they were hidden away in a language I couldn't speak.

He will not stoop to the mediaeval superstition of 'Good-bye'.

You don't understand. Speaking, talking--language, that is--represents the most orderly, civilized, and rational expression of human nature. All this foul-mouthed cussing is a gap where you can't think of anything to say. It's the opposite of being rational and ordered. The very opposite. It wants to unpick civilized behavior, rationality, and order.

Las palabras moldean el pensamiento, remueven los sentimientos y accionan las fuerzas. Matan y reviven, corrompen y curan.

And what if orphans really were called orchids? And if the sky was called the ground. And if a tree was called a daffodil. Would it make any difference to the actual nature of things? Or their mystery?

It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life—oh so many more than we think—can never be explained at all.

Words were like an invisible skin, enwrapping the world and giving it reality. Yet you could not say the world would not be there, would not be real if you took away the words. At best it seemed that things might bless the words that distinguished them, and that words might bless everything.

Le parole erano come una pelle invisibile, che avvolgeva il mondo rendendolo reale.