Quotes About Language

She put the words back in the envelope, because fuck doing that again.

That's what's happening if you're getting all your news from one place. If you stop listening to someone the second you hear a word or phrase you've been taught belongs to the enemy, like "environment" or "job creators," that's what you're doing.

it's much easier to be incomprehensible than intelligent, and most people can't spot the difference.

Kikkhf fkattkx hfkixu zttkcu, she said. Shoasdsdaotdasasdme.

In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsafe to make a simple and direct statement.

Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called 'the literary flavour'.

For this, Clio has abused me in language less befitting a Muse than a fishwife. I do not care. I would rather be chidden by Clio than by my own sense of delicacy, any day.

The Judas grace (composed, they say, by Christopher Whitrid himself) is noted for its length and for the excellence of its Latinity.

Here commenced a scene of horrors," the dramatist Friedrich von Schiller later wrote, "for which history has no language, poetry no pencil.

That's a Z," I corrected, making sure to pronounce it "zee." "I'm afraid that's a zed," she counter-corrected

She turned quickly to face him, and with one part of his mind he thought, They call it falling in love, admiring as always the wisdom of the language. Not stumbling in love, not walking, striding, jumping, bouncing, crawling in love. You fall in love, straight forward like a chopped tree, straight down like a rock from a cliff: gravity, earth, concussion.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

In the Chinese language the word for righteousness is a combination of two characters, the figure of a lamb and a person. The lamb is on top, covering the person. Whenever God looks down at you, this is what he sees: the perfect Lamb of God covering you.

I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows, so i could have 20 minutes to write. I sat at my mother's deathbed, writing. I did swab her mouth with water, and feel her pliant tongue enjoy water, then harden and die. Before I had language, before I had stories, I wanted to write. That desire is going away. I've said what I have to say. I'll stop and look at things I called distractions. Become a reader of the world, no more writer of it.

To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.

Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don't do that. Some day we'll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.

The"b" word and the "n" word are like poison, whether you take poison from a vial or pour it into Bavarian crystal, it is still poison.

Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language to translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

Poetry is music for the human voice. Until you actually speak it or someone speaks it, it has not come into its own.

Some writers dress the truth in a kind of elegant language, so it doesn't seem quite so blatant, so harsh, so raw. But Rosa was not afraid of that."

Now no one is going to make you talk--possibly no one can. But bear in mind, language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals