Quotes About Language

That night Ana Iris and I go to a movie. We cannot understand the English but we both like the new theater's clean rugs.

En el Caribe cuando alguien habla bien tiene el respeto de la gente y de pequeño yo veía eso y me encantaba. Supongo que como a nosotros nos impusieron ese idioma colonial [el español] la resistencia consistió en eso: "Ok, tengo que aprenderlo, pero lo voy a convertir en oportunidad".

They waited respectfully for him to finish and then they said, their faces slowly disappearing in the gloom, Listen, we'll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in English. Fire, he blurted out, unable to help himself. Oscar--

Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.

Once the tyranny of literalness is rejected, all relevant considerations for giving a rational content to the words become operative.

Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'. "To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English," Peter said. "It's taken me most of today to get through a page.

her words, rather than functioning as a mere decoration of the experience, actually deepened its reality. It was the first time that I felt the power of language to intensify life. The

I'm not a guy who curses very much in my personal life. When I curse it sounds like a kid trying to be cool. But I think there are quite a few people, my father being one of them, who use curse words rather eloquently.

And then I had to trust in the universal language of a smile. Jacob had told me to smile at all the starers, that ultimate act of disarming. As he said, it was the reason why so many doctors gave their time to perform cleft palate and cleft lip surgeries. Smiles biologically bonded mothers to their babies, kicked in their mothering instinct. Fix the smile, save the child. So I bet on it now. I smiled.

As if you can measure literary excellence with precise instruments; as if there were a science of writing, governed by equations that reveal immutable truths.

Each new grammar pattern we find sheds light on how the human brain creates language. The loss of even one language may forever close the door to a full understanding of human cognitive capacity.

Science aims at a closer relation between word and fact.

Once you become fluent in a language or in a set of ideas, you immediately internalize them to the extent that other languages and ideas sound automatically strange and foreign.

Ah". Tzimisces smiled. "Let me guess. Flowery periphrases, back-to-back literary allusions and quotations from thousand-year-old authors. A marked reluctance to use one word when twelve can be jammed in if you sit on the lid.

I've been calling it him, but so what? Go back and change the pronouns for yourself, if they offend you.

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.

He told friends that this ancient Hindu text—"The Lord's Song"—was "the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.

Wackford tat nur wenige Dinge schnell, und sprechen gehörte nicht dazu. Er war fleißig, bemüht und stark wie ein junger Dockarbeiter, aber Geschwindigkeit war für ihn ein Fremdwort wie Frontispiz und Faksimile.

Words are so powerful. It can win wars, create kings, and sustain civilizations. - Wordwick Games by Kailin Gow

Lizard people?" Jack raises an eyebrow. "I have to call them something. And 'lizard people' is a little less scary than 'big, invulnerable thing that nearly killed us'." "Lizard people it is," Jack agrees., FADE by Kailin Gow

Words made physical were like words made magical. - Earthling (Red Genesis #2)

We must remember, however, that art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies.

Pride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is fakhr and nazish - both names that you can find more than once on our family tree.

The next day it's Virginia Woolf who wafts through. Hers is a curiously insistent presence; take your eyes off her for a moment and the next thing you know she's rearranging your syntax as though it were cutlery improperly laid out for a seven-course meal with some foreign dignitary who disdains your nation's table manners.