Quotes About Language

In fact, words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture's meaning.

True that Benjamin used a communist language in the last years of his life, so he looks different to us now. But that's because he died in 1940. Those last years were the ones in which communist language regained authority--seen as necessary to fight fascism (identified as The Enemy). Had Benjamin lived as long as Adorno he would have become as a-social, as disillusioned with left as Adorno did.

To say a feeling, an impression is to diminish it - expel it

Toda a capacidade de compreender está enraizada na capacidade de dizer não.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya's and photographs by the convention that artists make drawings and paintings while photographers take photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

I am thinking—talking—in images. I don't know how to write them down. Every feeling is physical.

Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.)

Ah, these English. So refined and so coarse. If they did not exist, nobody would ever have invented them. So eccentric, so superficial, so reserved. But how they enjoy themselves.

But also, as with Baldwin, that passion seemed to transmute itself too readily into stately language, into an inexhaustible self-perpetuating oratory. The moral imperatives—love, moderation—offered to palliate intolerable historical or metaphysical dilemmas were too general, too abstract, too rhetorical.

Whether the photograph is understood as a naïve object or the work of an experienced artificer, its meaning—and the viewer's response—depends on how the picture is identified or misidentified; that is, on words.

This bourgeois conjunction of sign and signified is apparent in the dramatic rescue of the classics offered in advertisements for gilt-and-leather volumes of "The World's Greatest Literature.

Precision in language was the key to clarity. Specificity

No more taking the Lord's name in vain or even in earnest.

But when the fairy sang the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.

She even learnt the language of a strange country which Senior Cosetti had been told some people believed still existed, although no-one in the world could say where it was. The name of this country was Wales.

Unfortunately, Childermass's French was so strongly accented by his native Yorkshire that Minervois did not understand and asked Strange if Childermass was Dutch.

With characteristic exuberance Tom named this curiously constructed house Castel des Tours saunz Nowmbre, which means the Castle of Innumerable Towers. David Montefiore had counted the innumerable towers in 1764. There were fourteen of them.

The sky spoke to him. It was a language he had never heard before. He was not even certain there were words. Perhaps it only spoke to him in the black writing the birds made. He was small and unprotected and there was no escape. He was caught between earth and sky as if cupped between two hands. They could crush him if they chose.

He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.

She spoke the language of the Scottish Highlands (which is like singing).

She spoke Basque, which is a language which rarely makes any impression upon the brains of any other race, so that a man may hear it as often and as long as he likes, but never afterwards be able to recall a single syllable of it.

Strange bent over these things, with a concentration to rival Minervois's own, questioning, criticizing and proposing. Strange and the two engravers spoke French to each other. To Strange's surprize Childermass understood perfectly and even addressed one or two questions to Minervois in his own language. Unfortunately, Childermass's French was so strongly accented by his native Yorkshire that Minervois did not understand and asked Strange if Childermass was Dutch.