Quotes About Language

It didn't matter that Amelia was fluent in Mandarin and could code as well as a first-year at Peking University, she was still treated like her mother: as an interloper.

Imposed isolation began with that thirty-day rule in 1348 but was then extended to forty days in 1403. The label "quarantine" stuck because cuarànta means "forty days

His mind had been working away behind his high forehead. Unimaginative himself he could recognize imagination in her: he had come upon one whose whole nature was the contradiction of his own. He knew that behind her simplicity was something he could never have. Something he despised as impractical. Something which would never carry her to power or riches, but would retard her progress and keep her apart in a world of her own make-believe. To win her favour he must talk in her own language.

Glorious,' said Steerpike, 'is a dictionary word. We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.

Words can be tiresome as a swarm of insects. They can prick and buzz! Words can be no more than a series of farts; or on the other hand they can be adamantine, obdurate, inviolable, stone upon stone.

Changing the words you use will help you change your attitude to the situation you're in and the life you live. Do you hear that? The words we use become the life we live.

Our words become our attitudes and our attitudes become our life.

Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.

Lady stand on line before me, speak English so good, like genius, in America only four years, I ashamed tell twenty-two years; I tell twenty!" To class she went only once. "I don't go back," she said emphatically. "Too foolish book, Dick and Jane." She shrugged disdainfully. "Not Tolstoi!

How different things might be if, rather than saying I think I'm in love, we were saying I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I'm on the way to knowing love. Or if instead of saying I am in love we say I am loving or I will love. Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.

If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue.

We use the word love in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything.

When we black people commit ourselves to living simply as a political action, as a way of breaking the stress caused by unrelenting hedonistic desire for material objects that are not needed for survival, or essential to well-being, we will not be talking about ebonics. We will be out in the streets demanding that the public schools have enough teachers so that all kids, cross color, can read and write in standard English and in Spanish too.

Individuals who speak languages other than English, who speak patois as well as standard English, find it a necessary aspect of self-affirmation not to feel compelled to chose one voice over another, not to claim one as more authentic but rather to construct social realities that celebrate, acknowledge and affirm differences, variety.

I was taught that it was important to speak but to talk a talk that was in itself a silence.

I have had the pain of fragmentation deeply impressed upon my consciousness. The alienation felt by many people who are concerned about domination – the struggle we have even to make of our words a language that can be shared, understood.

It is particularly distressing that so many recent books on love continue to insist that definitions of love are unnecessary and meaningless. Or worse, the authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women - that the sexes should respect and adapt to our inability to communicate since we do not share the same language. This type of literature is popular because it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture or love.

Kindlon and Thompson carefully depoliticize their language. Their use of the word "tradition" belies the reality that the patriarchal culture which has socialized almost everyone in our nation to dismiss the emotional life of boys is an entrenched social and political system.

When poetry stirs in my imagination it is almost always from an indirect place, where language is abstract, where the mood and energy is evocative of submerged emotional intelligence and experience.

the possession of a term does not bring a process or a practice into being; concurrently one may practice theorizing without ever knowing/possessing the term.

Ethics and aesthetics are deeply intertwined. Art, beauty, and craft have always drawn on the self-organizing 'wild' side of language and mind. Human ideas of place and space, our contemporary focus on watersheds, become both models and metaphors. Our hope would be to see the interacting realms, learn where we are, and thereby move towards a style of planetary and ecological cosmopolitanism.

rather than saying "I think I'm in love," we were saying "I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I'm on the way to knowing love." Or if instead of saying "I am in love" we said "I am loving" or "I will love." Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.

There is always something more to be said, and it is always so difficult to turn up the splice neatly at the edges.

He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.