Quotes About Language

T.S. Eliot said to me "There's only one way a poet can develop his actual writing – apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud – and it doesn't matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it's in another language.) What matters above all, is educating the ear.

For Browning, Mr. Pound has always professed strong admiration (see Mesmerism in Personae); there are traces of him in Cino and Famam Librosque Cano, in the same volume. But it is more profitable to comment upon the variety of metres and the original use of language. Ezra Pound

Halide gave [the goat] a name: 'Kaplan'. 'What does it mean?' I asked her. 'Oh, it means tiger in Turkish,' she said, laughing. 'Don't you think it is a ferocious little thing?' Halide would also, when she could, go out and whisper in Turkish to the goat. When I asked her about it, she said, in her sombre manner, 'But of course, animals understand what you say. They just do not speak. Every good farmer knows that.

evidently Europeans cannot stop themselves from giving new names to people and places. I guess it must be hard to stop after all those centuries of renaming stuff in the colonies.

Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that's my philosophy.

Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him.

Every time you open your mouth," Clarence said, "you just seem older and weirder.

I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.

An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems.

Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.

But he spoke English better than I, he having mastered it, whereas I was only born to its careless use.

Sometimes she can't find the right word, but she can find a word close to what she means. Anomia, the speech therapist calls

Perhaps this is why Muslims insist that no translation of the Qur'an is the Qur'an. The true Qur'an is the whole package, indivisible: the words and their meanings, yes, but also the very sounds, even the look of the lettering when the Qur'an is in written form.

A bad name is just a fart with consonants.

unfortunately, I am incapable of thinking up perfectly biting, split-second retorts, in any language. The French even have a word for this: l'esprit de l'escalier; staircase wit, something you only think of on the way out.

The Vazdru do not weep. Who weeps? Not I. Every word spoken was a tear.

Les Vazdru ne pleurent pas. - Chaque parole prononcée fut une larme.

I would like to discuss the psychological determinates in your use of copulative profanity.

This gave him another opportunity to use one of those words that hung before him, shining and alluring. Far away in the distance there were more of them, dangerously sharp. Words that were not for him, but which he used all the same on the sly, and which had an exciting flavour and gave him a tingling feeling in the head. They were a little dangerous, all of them.

You, Book! You are the only one who won't deceive, won't attack, won't insult, won't abandon! You're quiet - but you laugh, shout, and sing: you're obedient - but you amaze, tease, and entice; you're small, but you contain countless peoples. Nothing but a handful of letters, that's all, but if you feel like it, you can turn heads, confuse, spin, cloud, make tears spring to the eyes, take away the breath, the entire soul will stir in the wind like a canvas, will rise in waves and flap its wings!

That's what poems are for, so you don't understand a thing.

But writing and language can do more than just program you. It can manifest reality, as Burroughs explores in his own writing. Burroughs suggests that the act of writing manifests reality because writing manifests the future.

We're the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago!

So this conscious search for a 'solid' irrefutably defined basic (and therefore 'limited') kit of words drew me inevitably towards the solid irrefutably defined basic kit of my experiences – drew me towards animals, basically: my childhood and adolescent pantheon of wild creatures, which were saturated by first hand intense feeling that went back to my infancy. Those particular subjects, in a sense, were the models on which I fashioned my workable language.