Quotes About Language

Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'?

If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry...thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.

When you're lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo'd by anxiety,I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety.

He uses language that would make your hair curl.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.

MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.

I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon.

And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure?

Doesn't the seventeenth-century use of the measurement yard for penis strike you as a bit of an exaggeration, unless the yard then was not the yard now?

Y cuanto más vivo más convencido estoy de que cuando digo yo en realidad estoy diciendo nosotros.

Each had his own language for seeing, and that language created vision. We all inherit vision just as they did - two men who stood side by side but were nevertheless separated by and intellectual chasm.

Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language.

I know that what's said is often less important than the tone of voice in which the words are spoken. There is music in dialogue, mysterious harmonies and dissonances that vibrate in the body like a tuning fork.

Para quién narramos, después de todo? Incluso en la soledad de nuestra cabeza existe un supuesto otro, la segunda persona de nuestro discurso.

It's a language I've come to hate, because it admits no mystery and no ambiguity into its smug vocabulary, which arrogantly suggests that everything can be known.

Mirroring makes speech possible; language relies on the reflective quality of I and you through which verbal interaction becomes possible.

On the playground, children used to sing the chorus "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Few things then or now have ever struck me as more false than that ludicrous chant. Words can devastate, and they can heal.

She talked as if she were observing her own sentences...

Language, after all, is impersonal and personal, particular and general, both inside us and outside us, and James writes with a profound awareness of this fact. Words are where the public and private intersect.

we can't escape the erotic vocabulary of our culture any more than we can escape language itself.

The ache of love feels remarkably like the ache of grief or guilt. Emotional pain isn't distinguishable by feeling, only by language. We give a name to misery, not because we recognize the feeling but because we know its context.

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

The language of love is the language of humility or humbleness.

Something there is in cyberspace that doesn't love an apostrophe.