Quotes About Language

Words are ugly when they travel in packs.

Construí uma porta feita de palavras e por ela fugi

Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive--and getting away with it--is far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun." "Then why are Mom and

With verbs randomly scattered about instead of neatly stacked at the end of each sentence, verbs that had no real endings, and nondeclension nouns, the language was oral chaos.

German had a lumbering, bull-in-china-shop feel, yet their culture gave birth to essential words that told much of what lay within: Schadenfreude, Angst, Weltschmerz—joy at the misfortune of others, anguish, sorrow at the world—words revealing the yawning abyss in their souls? But then there was a fine word that sounded like what it meant, Gemütlichkeit. Still

Freeman looked up and grinned. "Karl, this author is American and plainly loves twisted language. Listen: 'The idiot god Azathoth, that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity.' Superb nonsense." Karl snorted. "Why are you reading such stuff?" "It's a novel of horror. Seems appropriate in a war, somehow." Karl

You speak French and Italian?" Moe lounged back, crossing long legs. "Having been acquainted for years with that beautiful creature known as Latin, I try to savor its ornate, loquacious offspring. Yet the French accent eludes me." Karl smiled. Somehow this big guy with an easy, sliding smile and precise diction made you like him. Presence, that's it. "My wife can help you with that. Have dinner with us." Moe Berg

That's how we keep this crazy place together - with the heart. Two hundred fuckin' languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It's the heart that keeps us together. There's no place with people like my people, Lin. There's no heart like the Indian heart.

We can't really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we're forced to stumble in someone else's.

as if the word was a euphemism for some kind of infection.

We can't really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we're forced to stumble in someone else's.

Did anyone ever tell you you've got a very peculiar way of putting things?

I think it is possible, and it is reasonable to say, that light is the language of God. Light may be the way that God speaks to the universe, and to us.

????? «Ã'"??????» ?????????? ?? ?????????? famulus, «Ã'луга», ???????????? ?? ????? familia, ????????????? ???? ??????????, ? ?????? ? ????.

The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

When you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even it it's a moronic proclamation ... Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself 'the American' at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.

Born in England during the First World War, of Belgian parents with partly German roots, I grew up in the cosmopolitan city of Antwerp, where I had the benefit of a classical education taught in the two national languages of Belgium: French and Dutch.

After the turmoil of the Second World War, my family ended up in Russian-occupied East Germany. When I attended fourth grade, I had to learn Russian as my first foreign language in school. I found this quite difficult because of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as time went on, I seemed to do all right.

After the Second World War, people in Japan no longer died for their country, and even that expression was no longer used.

I was born in Breslau on October 5th, 1930. At that time, Breslau, now called Wroclaw, belonged to Germany, and only German was spoken there. After the Second World War, Breslau became Polish, and the original German population was almost completely replaced by a Polish one. I have never visited Wroclaw after the war.

I always thought those World War II films with German people speaking English with German accents was weird.

If someone had protected the HTML language for making Web pages, then we wouldn't have the World Wide Web.

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.