Quotes About Language

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.

My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.

Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation.

Take care what words you speak that follow "I am." In so speaking you create your life.

By turning back on verbal littering, you are suggesting that it's okay to junk the world.

He didn't sing the language the way the French did, enjoying every word.

Despite our daily observations to the contrary, I assure you that children are, by nature, spiritual beings, until we destroy through our example. In my own field of language I remember, and still can see, there being no problem here. A child knows, whether it be in the traditional structure of a fairy tale, or the special use of an archaism, when Mystery is engaged.

I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.

I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said.

If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. -- Speaking to a Senate Committee in 1987, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly, November 4, 2005.

I know you think you understand what you thought I said , but I'm not sure realized that what you heard isn't what I meant

I know you think you understand what you thought I said , but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard isn't what I meant

I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour' 'Well, it's bloody close...' 'Well, they often are....

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

Language is the realm of the poet, of desire and hope, of the search for and expression of infinity.

T. S. Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the nineteenth century: "When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.

Good thing I'm driving or I'd kick you in the balls. Oh, wait, we're in England. I'd kick you in the bollocks.

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

Professor Henry Higgins: There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!