Quotes About Language

When the Warriors are on, my wife keeps away from me. I'm a rabid fan, and my language sometimes is not too good.

I have failed 'Star Wars' trivia tests. People come up to me at conventions and use terms that I've never heard of.

It is not our sexual preferences, the color of our skin, the language we speak, nor the religion we practice that creates friction, hatred and wars amongst in society. It is our words and the words of our leaders that can create that disparity.

I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.

My mother, who grew up in Pennsylvania, literally washed my mouth out with soap once for saying, 'Shut up!' to my sister. She would have washed my mouth out with gasoline if she knew how foul my mouth was racially when she wasn't around.

It was astonishing how much meaning could be crammed into a single word. How did such words not crumble under their own weight?

Quootla had a suffix, - utl , that could be glued to the end of anything—nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, small rodents—and meant the word itself plus its opposite, simultaneously. It didn't always translate into Goreddi. Time/no-time almost made sense; blue/orange or fall/rise or dog/whatever-the-opposite-of-dog-is were perfectly intelligible in Quootla but boggling to nearly everyone else.

We name something to make it real, to give it meaning.

Dragons aren't good at metaphor.

We should torture language to tell the truth.

But since you bring it up, Didier, you know what I think of language? That it's a fake horizon and there's something else, a real truthful thing, but language is keeping us from it. And I think we should torture language to stop fucking around and tell it to us. We should torture language to tell the truth.

Reading him was like reading runes — apparently you had to know the language.

An animal that doesn't talk -- what a concept," Adriane remarked.

I never understood why something as wet and with so much sucking and licking is called a blowjob. Men don't pause long enough to give a shit, is the only conclusion I've developed over the years.

Some of the choices teenagers make are morally and practically wrong. Some of my characters do things I hope my child won't. There are occasionally words my characters choose that I wouldn't utter in my mother's presence. But when I was sixteen, or twelve, hanging out with my friends? That was different. For a story to feel real, I have to respect what a character would really do or say.

So much happiness is caged in language, ready to burst out anytime and fade

The feeling of emptiness is a pre-existing condition. Jargon forces intimacy.

Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

Con dizir flama non se quema la boca (refrán sefardí)

Some people never really talk about anything—they just repeat the same old sentence from time to time.

Being abroad gave me the tongue of a child, and soon it gave me a child's heart to match. You know that heart and tongue are made from the same flesh.

Thoughts can exist... feelings can exist... but words do not always exist.

He was a poet and hated the approximate.

A slip of the tongue is not the fault of the mind a kick on the arse will bring back the mind