Quotes About Language

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi's, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself.

Las palabras aparecen en tu mente y allí bailan a ritmos de los que tú conscientemente nada sabes. Cabos y rabos de palabras: pueden ser una indicación de un estado de ánimo oculto. Pueden removerse o cantar durante días, enloqueciéndote. Pueden ser como película invisible, como pelicula adhesiva, entre tú y la realidad.

To tell a great story, you really do have to step through the box that the world has put around you; you have to see it. You have to see what the world has defined you as. And you have to refute it in language that the world will understand. ... Repay the debt that kept you alive, you will make an art and you will take a leap. And, oh God, I hope you get all the way over to the other side. Because some of us don't.

Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.

If we are forced to talk about our lives, our sexuality, and our work only in the language and categories of a society that despises us, eventually we will be unable to speak past our own griefs. We will disappear into those categories. What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience.

What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience

Acrostics in French or acrostics in Hebrew were still Greek to him.

They spoke in Latin, so that all might understand; but the quotations they flung at each other were Greek and Hebrew, Turkish, Persian.

Why do you call him M. d'Harcourt? You called Jerott Jerott.' 'I called Jerott a great deal worse than that.

We?' said Chancellor. 'I am lavishly paid,' Danny said, 'to think in the first person plural.

You rode sixty miles through the night for a brother who doesn't exist. I haven't been here for four years. I have been growing and changing, somewhere else, with different people, speaking a different language. The old ties are gone: my family wouldn't recognize me: what in God's name do you think I could find to say to them?

I don't object to being called by my Christian name, on purely social occasions. The Russian version was Frangike. Rather scented, I thought. Or alternatively, like a new brand of onion.

Lymond made no concessions on the grounds of language. If they fought abroad they would be expected as a matter of course to speak as their allies did. If they did not already know several European languages, then they must learn.

I don't need to strike you. Words will do just as well.

he appeared to be struggling with something trapped in his throat; it turned out to be a word. thanks, he said.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.

After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.

They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

But the worse you express yourself these days the more profound people think you--though that's nothing new.

By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words.

I will say here and now that I have never discovered, nor can I see, any reasonable use or excuse for the " waynee, weedee, weekee " convention. It is not merely that I have a profound sympathy with one of my friends who says he just cannot believe that Caesar was the kind of man to talk in that kind of way. Caesar may, indeed, have done so, but what then ?