Quotes About Language

Poetry is a totally different art than film.

How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can't even understand one another?

PotÄ™ga frazesu byÅ'a i jest w Polsce arcypotÄ™gÄ…. DziaÅ'a ona na mózg polski zupeÅ'nie tak, jak du?a butla spirytusu.

There are grammatical errors even in his silence.

En el principio era el Verbo y en el final el lugar común.

People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.

words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere.

No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead. The shaping power of language cannot be avoided. We cannot choose to distance ourselves from it. We can n choose to employ it in one way rather than another. (42)

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive

What is a sentence, anyway?

Wij hebben geen onvervreemdbaar en 'natuurlijk' recht op het vrije woord. Elke samenleving zal bepaalde uitingen pornografisch of opruiend achten en taboe verklaren. De betekenis van zowel 'vrij' als 'woord' wordt doorlopend aangepast om aan de behoeften van de gemeenschap tegemoet te komen.

It is often said that the job of language is to report or reflect or mirror reality, but the power of language is greater and more dangerous than that; it shapes reality, not of course in a literal sense - the world is one thing, words another - but in the sense that the order imposed on a piece of the world by a sentence is only one among innumerable possible orders.

Language shapes consciousness, And the use of language to shape consciousness Is an important branch of magic.

Does it matter that people and things Have words, Have names? If not, Why read any book? A litany of useless letters Detached from bone, muscle. Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement, Person Real?

I saw how the idea, still colourless, nothing but pure and flowing heat, streamed from the furnace of his impulsive excitement like the molten metal to make a bell, then gradually, as it cooled, took shape, I saw how that shape rounded out powerfully and revealed itself, until at last the words rang from it and gave human language to poetic feeling, just as the clapper gives the bell its sound.

when my own works disappeared from the German language I could more clearly grasp his lament at being able to produce the created word only in translation, in a diluted, altered medium.

Her words came tumbling out in pursuit of the images hurrying through her mind.

Die Familie der Mutter ist international, bei Familientreffen wird Italienisch, Französisch, Deutsch oder Englisch gesprochen. Die jüdische Herkunft spielt dabei keine Rolle, niemand im familiären Umfeld praktiziert die Religion.

?nsanlar beni anlam?yor, ben de onlar? anlam?yorum.

M]y favorite teacher was explaining that you don't say but however . These are pleonasms: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. There are times in life that are very but however .

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

There was a magic in the words. I suppose their power lay in their utter futility.