Quotes About Language

It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. 

The way he talked sounded part Yankee, part foreign, like one of those friendly Irish policeman in the old movies: Ouch, mind you!

is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

You know what really gets me?" I asked him. "How people call you 'illegals.' That just pisses me off, I don't know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?

and do not for the love of the Lord say you're laying down if you mean lying down.

It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

No, you shouldn't. But you are here, so yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes.

In my time I've learned surprising things about the powers stacked against us before we're born. But the way of my people is to go on using the words they've always given us: Ignorant bastard. Shit happens.

She whirled around and threw the spatula, not missing my head by all that wide of a margin. I was shocked, not so much by her language but by the strength of that pitch. Usually Rachel threw underhanded and was no threat at all.

Words only cover the experience of living.

To tell me it's supposed to stop raining, you came up here?" Lusa asked, looking from one sun-toughened face to the other for some clue. It was always like this, anytime she got wedged into a conversation with her brothers-in-law. This sense of having wandered into a country where they spoke English but all the words meant something different.

Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree.

Thérèse leans close and looks up at me, her eyebrows tilting like the accents above her name.

it. But when a man's words are taken from him and poisoned, it's the same as poisoning the man. He could not speak, for how his own tongue would be fouled. Words were his all. I felt I'd witnessed a murder, just as he'd seen his friend murdered in Mexico. Only this time they left the body living.

No, you shouldn't have come here. But you are here, so yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world then yes and no.

You must understand the language of your enemy.

He gave Blanche the cheeky "Hey, girl" greeting that teenage white boys working up to being full-fledged rednecks give grown black women in the South. Blanche hissed some broken Swahili and Yoruba phrases she'd picked up at the Freedom Library in Harlem and told the boy it was a curse that would render his penis as slim and sticky as a lizard's tongue. The look on his face and the way he clutched his crotch lifted her spirits considerably.

I've often wondered why condoms are called French letters.

First was the fewer, not less. Now it was the care in avoiding a preposition at the end of a sentence. An educated man, presumably. Precise. Apparently fussy about small-minded rules, perhaps to compensate for a willingness to ignore large ones.

Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters;

Her English, though accented, was idiomatic. She would have learned it young enough to pick up the idiom, but not quite young enough to eradicate the accent.

May I join you?" she asked. Her English was lightly accented with something warm, maybe Spanish or Portuguese. "Please," I said, standing and pulling back a chair for her. "Is English all right?" "Of course," she said, looking at me closely. "You… you're American?" I nodded. "My parents are Japanese, but I grew up in America. I'm more comfortable in English.

My American and Japanese personalities are distinct, and I carry myself differently depending on which language I'm using and which mode I'm in.

Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.