Quotes About Language

What appeals to me about 'Blind Willie' is just how sparse that music is. Just this idea - the grain of it, the rawness of it and the simplicity of it. The directness of the language.

French and German illustrate the misleading character of apparent grammatical simplicity just as well.

A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him.

I let Brel into my world. What I like about him is the simplicity of his language. It's not so simple to be simple.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

What's going on? On the one hand, analogical thinking seems to be our birthright. Metaphorical connections saturate our language, drive our science, enliven our literature, burst out (at least occasionally) in children's speech, and remind us of things past. On the other hand, when experimentalists lead the horse to water, they can't make it drink.

Put yourself in the booties of a child who is in the midst of figuring out how to speak the language as it is spoken by parents, friends, and siblings.

To have a second language is to have a second soul, said Charlemagne around 800 AD. Each language has its own cognitive toolkit, said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.

What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don't have language for. What fascinates me about that is we're talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It's almost a paradox that you're seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn't have language for it.

If you're an alien, how come you sound like you come from the north?' 'Lots of planets have a north.' Doctor Who, 2005

How can you trust someone who doesn't bother to spell correctly or can't manage to lay out a simple declarative sentence?

But love is like a language. If you speak it, it flows more and more easily. If you don't, then you start to lose it.

Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages? August said. And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word.

Did you know there are 32 names for love in one of the Eskimo language? And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have more ways to say it.

The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother? The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It's the language the soul understands.

Aunt-Sister said Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness.

To name is to define and shape reality.

It's my earliest memory: arranging my brother's marbles into words. It is summer, and I am beneath the oak that stands in the back corner of the work yard. Thomas, ten, whom I love above all the others, has taught me nine words: SARAH, GIRL, BOY, GO, STOP, JUMP, RUN, UP, DOWN. He has written them on a parchment and given me a pouch of forty-eight glass marbles with which to spell them out, enough to shape two words at a time.

Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages? August said. And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving a Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have more ways to say it?

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness. Missus was a short

struggling to compress the vastness of what I felt into words.

women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men. Until that moment I'd had no idea just how important language is in forming our lives. What happens to a female when all

Words collected in my mouth and lay there.