Quotes About Language

What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?

I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her own unknowable tongue - which Constantin said was the most difficult part, because the Russians didn't have the same idioms as our idioms - and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another. it mightn't make me any happier, but would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.

Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn't stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers...I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all of the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

If i never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.

But will do 5 pages a day until plodding I catch up. Use words as poet uses words. That is it! Gulley Jimson is an artist with words, too – – – or, rather Joyce Cary is. But I must be a word-artist. The

have deserted french

Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling

When we talk about Poetry, with a capital P, we are apt to think only of the more intense emotions or the more magical phrase: nevertheless there are a great many casements in poetry which are not magic, and which do not open on the foam of perilous seas, but are perfectly good windows for all that.

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

What the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

I gotta use words to talk to you.

Each day a raid on the inarticulate--T.S. Eliot

the communication/of the dead is tongued with fire beyond/the language of the living--The Little Gidding

Because the particular has no language. One thinks to escape

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch

Well here again that don't apply But I've gotta use words when I talk to you.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.

Their syntax and choice of words affirm their superiority. You cannot live on a high plane and indulge yourself in verbiage.

A poesia de um povo deriva sua vida da fala do povo e, por sua vez, dá-lhe uma vida; e representa o seu ponto mais elevado de consciência, o seu maior poder e a sua mais delicada sensibilidade.

I cannot feel that my appreciation of Milton leads anywhere outside of the mazes of sound.

In that case we must say that rhetoric is any adornment or inflation of speech which is not done for a particular effect but for a general impressiveness.

I have all of the rightminded feeling about John That you consider appropriate. Only, that's not the language That I choose to be talking. I will not talk yours.