Quotes About Language

I could go on and on and on about how we use the word 'place' in so many different ways. About how somebody might ask you 'Where you at?' And they're not asking where are you sitting, where are you living, they're asking: 'How are you doing?

There are so many people in the world who cannot read English or French or whatever.

I think my love for rhythm in language comes from repeating the same words, the same sounds, over and over again day after day for so many years.

I spent so many years not understanding my own gender identity and not having the language for it, and not having those conversations, that now I'm so eager to talk about it. Then I learn more about myself and other people.

Singing in a different language is a challenge, but 'Will I See You' was so much fun to create.

To say "I'm hungry" in French you say "J'ai faim"—"I have hunger"—and when you are finished, you do not say that you are full, but "Je n'ai plus faim"—"I have no more hunger.

The only discordant note in the conversation came when I casually dropped the slang expression for psilocybin when asking him about going hunting for 'shrooms. "I really, really hate that word," he said, almost gravely, adopting the tone of a parent upbraiding a potty-mouthed child. The word never crossed my lips again.

By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. ... What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.

O-karada o daiji ni," Ali said quietly, kissing Pope on the cheek as she passed him by. A beautiful Japanese phrase, it meant "take care of yourself." But, literally translated, it was "your body is precious.

A film is a system, not of meanings, but of signifiers.

The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.

A man of genius belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of nature, which is always everywhere the same.

Handling and use by able minds give value to a language, not so much by innovating as by filling it out with more vigorous and varied services, by stretching and bending it.

Our understanding is conducted solely by means of the word: anyone who falsifies it betrays public society. It is the only tool by which we communicate our wishes and our thoughts; it is our soul's interpreter: if we lack that, we can no longer hold together; we can no longer know each other. When words deceive us, it breaks all intercourse and loosens the bonds of our polity.

To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, and other grammar words, would not one think they signified some rare and exotic form of speaking? And yet they are phrases that come near to the babble of my chambermaid. And

Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human.

Saxansaxo', for example, meant the smell and the coolness carried on the wind from a place where it's raining to a place where it isn't. how could one word mean something so marvellous?

I believe I... offended them in some way. I don't know how. I think my English is not as good as it needs to be in certain situations.' 'It sounds excellent to me.' He sighed. 'That is the problem perhaps. If it was worse, there would be an expectation of...' He laboured silently, then let the sentence roll back down the mountain. 'There would not be the automatic expectation of shared understanding.

but that German sounds like old clergymen vomiting.

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.

Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness

Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.