Quotes About Language

The fact is I have an interpreter because he gives me the security that, when I have to answer complex questions, and with my complex answers, it's much better I have an interpreter to make sure nothing is misconstrued.

When I hear an interview that I've done, and I've said 'like' a bunch of times, it just cheapens the sentiment.

All right, fine," she told Deep. "But just because you're a pessimist doesn't mean you have to be an asshole." Deep frowned. "Excuse me? A what? I'm not completely familiar with Earth vernacular yet." Lock grinned. "I think you've just been insulted, brother. And by one of the elite, no less. You should feel honored." "By

I'm dying and use words like gaunt . When I weigh 125, which is almost but not quite what Vogue might be able to deal with, I look as old as Jeanne Moreau when she's just murdered someone.

From now on, I thought, only French mice will love me.

After all, the Indo-European word cunt was derived from the goddess Kunda or Cunti, and shares the same root as kin and country.

So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things.

They tried to stop us even saying the names of some of the most precious parts of our bodies. But here's what I learned. If something isn't named, it is not seen, it doesn't exist.

modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know.

Unlike her judges, she suggested that words do not have set meanings, that there is a gap between speaker and listener, and that human understanding always "falls short of absolute truth.

Better mendacitiesThan the classics in paraphrase!

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

The committed student needs to be wide awake, to look and listen closely, to slow down, scrutinize and reflect. The language of poetry is so dense, so multivalent, that it demands a concentrated act of attention — and offers its greatest rewards only to those who reread.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.

La gran literatura no es más que el lenguaje cargado de sentido hasta el grado máximo que sea posible.

You hate translation??? What of it?? Expect to be carried up to Mt. Helicon in an easy chair?