Quotes About Language

Ah, reader! I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labours in the evasion of cacophony.

He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.

She could not explain the subtleties of her feeling as clearly as he could state his opinion, even though she had skill in speech, and her father had none.

Es muy difícil para una mujer expresar sus sentimientos en un lenguaje que, principalmente, sirve para que los hombres expresen los suyos.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. My

is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Es difícil para una mujer definir sus sentimientos en un lenguaje creado principalmente por el hombre para expresar los suyos.

I say what I mean. Would you like it better if I said 'I'm glad you find me so.' That would be a little fancier, and equally true.

Starling se preguntó si al pensar en las mujeres las consideraba «pieles», igual que algunos cretinos que suelen llamarlas «coños».

Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.

True' and 'false' are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither 'truth' nor 'falsehood.

Words are wise men's counters; they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.

The light of humane minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity, reason is the pace.... And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless ambiguous words are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities.

the general fund of vocabulary, nay, of discourse itself, so calamitous that the failure of the banks in 1929 seems paltry by comparison; so that we find verbal paupers all around us, tattered, emaciated, and reduced to the stark penury of such verbal resources as "It's like wow" or using "interface" or "office" as verbs.

That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

never trust a man who won't accept that there is more than one way to spell a word Paraphrased

A habilidade mais valiosa é aquela de jamais usar duas palavras quando uma apenas basta.

And so she went on, galloping through thickets of diphthongs, searching—I was sure—for the sound that would not disgrace her husband, and failing at every turn.

The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the Earth's malice - a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

rather babble away and at least partially express something difficult than reproduce impeccable clichés

Car lorsque les yeux parlent, ils tutoient, lors même que les lèvres n'ont pas encore prononcé un vous.

Pues cuando los ojos hablan tutean, aunque los labios no hayan pronunciado todavía un .