Quotes About Language

When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.

Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.

A bludgeon of wives (surely that must be the plural assignation)!

Logic is simply the language of convenient rationalization in a pseudo-science-loving civilization.

Just so. And wonder, my friend, is the intellect's most feared foe. Its path is love, and love is the language of humility. The rational mind would stand over it with a bloodstained sword, and in the empty bleakness of its eyes you will see its triumph.

Language was war, vaster than any host of swords, spears and sorcery. The self waging battle against everyone else. Borders enacted, defended, sallies and breaches, fields of corpses rotting like tumbled fruit. Words ever seeking allies, ever seeking iconic verisimilitude in the heaving press.

If we could assemble our words, merge those inside and out, we would be startled to find that we speak but a tenth of what we think. And yet, each of us presumes to expect that the other understands – indeed, hears both the spoken and the unspoken. Mad presumption!

Expectation is the hoary curse of humanity. One can listen to words, and see them as the unfolding of a petal or, indeed, the very opposite: each word bent and pushed tighter, smaller, until the very packet of meaning vanishes with a flip of deft fingers. Poets and tellers of tales can be tugged by either current, into the riotous conflagration of beauteous language or the pithy reduction of the tersely colourless.

I am as much a scholar as a warrior. T'isten'ur — a name with curious echoes. Tiste Andii, the Dwellers in Darkness. And, more rarely mentioned, and then in naught but fearful whispers, their shadow-kin, the Tiste Edur. Grey-skinned, believed extinct — and thankfully so, for it is a name sheathed in dread. T'isten'ur, the first glottal stop implies past tense, yes? Tlan, now T'lan — your language is kin to that of the Imass. Close kin.

After all, war knows no other language. In war we invite our own destruction. In war we punish our children with a broken legacy of blood.

Can there be magic in mere words?" "Magic powerful enough to drive gods to their knees, soldier.

quagmire of verbosity

It's a fact that men don't need words, but women do. We have penises, after all. Who needs words when you have a penis? Whereas with women there are two breasts, which invites conversation, just as a good behind presents perfect punctuation, something every man knows. What's wrong with the world? You ask a man and he says, 'Don't ask.' Ask a woman and you'll be dead of old age before she's finished.

any exchange of words with a woman was fraught with her torturer's array of deadly implements, each one hovering at the very edge of a man's comprehension.

that is the journey of your life, godling, to learn the language of your soul, to learn it to learn it even as you live it.

Words knit the skein between and among women. And the language of gesture and expression, all merging to fashion a tapestry that, as every woman understood, could tear in but one direction, by deliberate, vicious effort. A friendship among women knew but one enemy, and that was malice. Thus, the more words, the tighter the weave.

Poets may know hunger,' she commented drily, 'but historians devour. And devouring murders language, makes of it a dead thing.

Nunca te muestres demasiado generoso con el conocimiento que posees. Las palabras son como monedas: merece la pena ahorrarlas.

But words were indeed ephemeral, able to sleet past all manner of defences, quick to cut, eager to draw blood.

At what point in the history of Letheras, he wondered, did rampant greed become a virtue? The level of self-justification required was staggering in its tautological complexity, and it seemed language itself was its greatest armour against common sense.

Hadrian cleared his throat and said, "Listen, HUB - oh and do thank Tammy for teaching you Terranglais. Hub, I have, uh, a question for you." "Proceed, Disappointingly Predictable and Wholly Enervating on the Spiritual-IQ Sentience-Complex Nodal Biological

It's a fact that men don't need words, but women do. We have penises, after all. Who needs words when you have a penis? Whereas with women there are two breasts, which invites conversation, just as a good behind presents perfect punctuation, something every man knows . What's wrong with the world? You ask a man and he says, 'Don't ask.' Ask a woman and you'll be dead of old age before she's finished. Hah. Hah ha.

The language of Consumer is most colorful. At last count, this language possesses twenty-nine thousand four hundred fifty six words and phrases to replace and deflect the immoral concept of 'greed'. It possesses Four Volumes of Rationalizations, Nine Volumes of Justifications and a Handy Quick-Chart of Suitable False Definitions of the concept of 'need', an essential resource to be used at the Moment of Indecision in Conjunction with Mouth- Watering Pupil- Dilating Desire.

Words were numbers were codes were formulae. Words held secret maps, the measuring of paces, the patterns of mortal minds, of histories, of cities, of continents and warrens.