Quotes About Language

it is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

Het woord is trouwens net een mangel die gevoelens gladstrijkt.

Coït, copulation. Mots à éviter. Dire : « Ils avaient des rapports… »

La parole est un laminoir qui allonge toujours les sentiments

Club4. Sujet d'exaspération pour les conservateurs. Embarras et discussion sur la prononciation de ce mot

Mora da osje?aji imaju malo rije?i kojima mogu da se služe.

Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.

Her name was Marroca, probably her maiden name, and she pronounced it as though it had fifteen r's in it.

La parole éblouit et trompe, parce qu'elle est mimée par le visage, parce qu'on la voit sortir des lèvres, et que les lèvres plaisent et que les yeux séduisent. mais les mots noirs sur le papier blanc, c'est l'âme toute nue.

He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.

The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.

The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of production — signs which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that system.

Words are the facial expressions of your mind: They communicate your attitude, personality, and perspective.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? GEORGE ORWELL, "POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Numbers are a bad idea for names because people won't know whether to use numerals (123) or to spell out the number (One Two Three).

It is a mistake to use intense words without carefully weighing and measuring them, or they will have already been used when one needs them later.

No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime.

She would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English; it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.

Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away - that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak - even just open her mouth - in public. A double distress, for even if she transgresses, her words fall almost always upon the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine.

There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment;

Forms strangely robed, but at once noble and familiar, walked abroad, and under the horned waning moon men talked wisdom in a tongue which I understood, though it was unlike any language I had ever known.

He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming.