Quotes About Language

If male homosexuals are called "gay," then female homosexuals should be called "ecstatic."

He cleared his throat. "I wish I could take back what I said." He looked away. "I behaved like a thoin aiseal." "What does that mean?" "A donkey's arse." She glanced down at the furs, found herself fighting a smile. "And how do you pronounce that? I somehow suspect I may have need of that phrase again.

We don't communicate in full sentences anyway. We don't need all those words.

He loved that she eschewed cursive for print, as he did. Cursive, more than anything, betrayed a person's age.

As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses!

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower.

TEN [exploding]. Bright! He's a common ignorant slob. He don't even speak good English! ELEVEN [slowly]. He doesn't even speak good English.

Also characteristic is the spareness of the punctuation (except for parentheses), the controlled patterning of the lines and section breaks. Thematically, Atwood here explores many of the concerns that have continued to intrigue her: the traps of reality, myth, language, and the pernicious roles we play, the cage of the self, and above all, the nature of human perception.

By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you can say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff.

To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.

We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted of us has the incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotions. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?

Paul Tillich has a beautiful formulation: "Language . . . has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.

Fieldworkers must build a community of sentiment, with local and long-distance members, that opposes the competitive individualism of academia. The lone scholar is a sociological impossibility. Our "individual" works rely on language, literatures, and feedback from colleagues (Becker, 1986).

These days (if I may steal a term from the jargon of the contemporary rialto), it is not politically correct to admit that some people die of old age.

Into the cities my people had gathered. They had become dizzy with words. Words had choked them. They could not breathe.

It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.

Japanese people have a funny habit of abbreviating names.

We spoke often of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, who argued that the future of the Jewish people depended on the existence of a Jewish state, one bonded together not just by religion but by language and nationality. "Let them give us sovereignty over a piece of the earth's surface, just sufficient for the needs of our people. Then we will do the rest.

Oh, sweet Jesus, English, I'm in love with you! Isn't that reason enough to marry me and put me out of my misery? - Rafael pg 451

I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

Kindness is a language the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

We were cousins united by blood but separated by language

Words were made only for babblers, women, and lawyers. Like Bismarck once said: "Words were given to us to hide our thoughts.