Quotes About Language

The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary

But when we sit together, close,' said Bernard, 'we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, 'Blah, blah, blah.' That's when I get crazy.

There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together.

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

It's like a puzzle, putting together your individual accent and what you grew up with or what you heard. It must be insane to be a dialect coach, to balance all that out.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Ah, these double meanings," she said. "Who invented the English language, I wonder? He did not do a stellar job of it, whoever he was.

Love wasn't about reasons. It wasn't about admiring fine qualities. Love was a language all on its own, composed of gestures that seemed incomprehensible, perhaps even pointless, to the outside observer. Speaking

Have you noticed, Marius, she asked on one occasion, that the English tend to feel that if they talk loudly enough, the French will understand them? As if talking French were an affliction of the deaf?

These attitudes, assumptions and prejudices are hard-wired into us: not into our brains (there is no neurological reason for us to hear low-pitched voices as more authoritative than high-pitched ones), but into our culture, our language and millennia of our history.

Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.

The Georgian had used more words in 5 minutes than Wyatt had spoken during 1872 and 1873 combined.

Celestina Giuliani learned the word slander at her cousin's baptism.

Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money. (64)

it seemed entirely possible to him that religion and literature and art and music were all merely side effects of a brain structure that comes into the world ready to make language out of noise, sense out of chaos. Our capacity for imposing meaning, he thought, is programmed to unfold the way a butterfly's wings unfold when it escapes the chrysalis, ready to fly. We are biologically driven to create meaning. And if that's so, he asked himself, is the miracle diminished? It

In the beginning, Scripture taught, there was the Word, and Danny would come to believe that the two great gifts his God had given to the species He loved were time, which divides experience, and language, which binds the past to the future.

Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.

1 Silence Where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence. -ADRIENNE

I couldn't have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mouth, to which I said i didn't give a shit.

Unless you're like my friend, poet Brooks Haxton (who translates Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, and German), throwing in three-dollar words will just make you look like a dick.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every