Quotes About Language

The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree.

Once the words are out there, they start to live and breathe in unpredictable ways.

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

Words are the most beautiful things existed in the world, but they die as fast as they were born, unless you convert them to act! The Secret Life of Bees

Tu enim, Caesar, civitatem dare potes hominibus, verbo non potes.

Be careful with your terminology: Great Leader, Dear Leader, Precious Leader. Those names have to be carefully used, or better yet, just stay away from discussing them at all.

I didn't understand their lineage or their language, they had somehow communicated with me.

Hooker was falsely thought to be the origin of the word for "prostitute," because his camp was so rowdy.

The ears of an Old One know that birds do not speak with the precision of words; instead they communicate with emotion. There are many kinds and degrees of emotion, and there are many kinds of expression even in the language of a bird.

Relabeling—a form of denial—takes a problem and hides it behind euphemisms.

Words got me into trouble. They are the deadliest weapons of all, so that now the gun seems almost innocent by comparison. I fired the shot to stop the words; they were so busy eating everything up. You have no idea how I hate words, how i see them winding out of people's mouths like sticky strands of a web, infinitely elastic, linking the speaker to the listener forever, and finally weaving an impermeable cocoon around the mind and then the poor, fast-beating heart itself.

While reading, I am moved by cadences and vocabularies, values and contexts tangential to or beyond me, but somehow pertinent to how I might begin to apprehend myself and the world differently or how foreign worlds I never encountered or even imagined might catch my attention and sweep me up in their sustained asymmetries.

A little word can have a big impact. The difference between all and some. - Liz Sutton

Well? Marsha asked when Charity had left. A single word with a thousand meanings, Josh thought grimly. What was it about women and language? They could make a man squirm without putting much effort into the task. A skill he both admired and feared.

Shit, fuck, damn." Disappointment tied her in knots. "I was really only interested in that middle part," she joked.

to the GPS system. It greeted her in French.

You do realize that bunny butt is just a polite way of saying rabbit ass.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.

It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little—have few verbal means. Eloquence—thinking in words—is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.