Quotes About Language

Words are loneliness.

I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans.

I do not believe in words, no matter if strung together by the most skillful man: I believe in language, which is something beyond words, something which words give only an adequate illusion of.

In this chthonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right.

No man ever puts down what he intended to say... words... are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.

She wanted them to argue with her, to gush, to rhapsodize. She wanted them to sparkle, not to chew. Words...words...words... She gobbled them up, spewed them out again, added them up, juggled them, nursed them along, carried them to bed and put them under the pillow like soiled pajamas, slept on them, snored over them. Words... When every other memory of her had fled there would remain-HER WORDS.

There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long.

The trouble with Irene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants fat letters to shove in her valise.

Aquellos dos hablaban de especie de jerga matemática superior. Nunca entraba en ella nada de carne y hueso: era extraña, fantasmal, espantosamente abstracta.

The poverty of language, which is to say the poverty of man's imagination or the poverty of his inner life, has created an ambivalence which is absolutely false.

No hotels in the past participle, no subjunctive modes, no conjunctivitis.

Las palabras son soledad. Anoche dejé unas palabras para ti sobre el mantel: las tapaste con los codos

The human voice is the organ of the soul.

O, never from the memory of my heart Your dear, paternal image shall depart, Who while on earth, ere yet by death surprised, Taught me how mortals are immortalized; How grateful am I for that patient care All my life long my language shall declare.

Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language; While we are speaking the word, it is is already the Past.

The great enemy of foreign language learning is a sense of shame, an inability or unwillingness to become like a child again and let one's inadequacies show.

Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.

The intellectual is called on the carpet... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.

Beware clarity. A man speaking to you in clear language is clearly using obsolete ideas.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.

I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that.

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

To understand a word, we need to learn where it was born, what paths it took to reach where it is today, and how it has changed along the way. The word 'nice' is a positive word today, but hundreds of years ago, it meant 'stupid.'