Quotes About Language

Words may be false and full of art, Sighs are the natural language of the heart.

Choice, like behavior and performance, is often circumvented by the vocabulary of the anointed.

languages as Asians, who outnumber them nearly four to one.121 Linguistic diversity is not only a sign of cultural isolation and fragmentation, it contributes to the barriers

The need for Nigerian clerks and other subordinates to help man the colonial administration required creating a new class of African people with education in the English language, with Westernized concepts, and with experience in Westernized ways of doing things.

The era of mass education and the standardization of the English language left such expressions as marks of uneducated people in the American South

The English language is damned difficult, but it's also damned rich, and so clear and bright that you can search out the darkest places with it.

Affaires meant 'business.' How like the French to kill two birds with one stone.

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it.

And I learned all those many years ago to stop listening to what people said, and listen instead to what they mean. Some people speak with honey and intend to serve us poison. You, my lord, speak with thorns but yearn for cake.

Knowing birds is like being fluent in a foreign language, or adept with a musical instrument.

It's poetry's job, isn't it, to keep making sense of the world in language, to keep the negotiation going? We can't relinquish that.

One difficulty that people seeking to modernize hymnals and the language of worship inevitably run into is that contemporaries are never the best judges of what works and what doesn't. This is something all poets know; that language is a living thing, beyond our control, and it simply takes time for the trendy to reveal itself, to become so obviously dated that it falls by the way, and for the truly innovative to take hold.

Language used truly, not mere talk, neither propaganda, nor chatter, has real power. Its words are allowed to be themselves, to bless or curse, wound or heal. They have the power of a 'word made flesh,' of ordinary speech that suddenly takes hold, causing listeners to pay close attention, and even to release bodily sighs--whether of recognition, delight, grief, or distress.

I do not know Whether I spoke or heard The word That fills all silence.

My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.

The use of the passive voice to disguise one's role in the making of a decision is imprecise and obfuscatory. You're a better adman than that. Active verbs! Why not say 'I refuse to pay you fairly'?

They seemed to be removed from her by more than just language. French people leading French lives. Why was it that anything you couldn't readily understand became mysterious and glamorous?

En el lenguaje humano, la sanidad de Pablo fue un milagro, pero la palabra milagro no se se encuentra en el vocabulario de Dios, porque todas estas sanidades son parte de Su misma Naturaleza.

Words, as you well know, can be powerful. - Digger

hundred and eighty-nine, and expertise in weaponry." "And you speak oddly." Knowing

pasted on a grin. "¿Usted desea bailar?" she asked. He didn't need Amber—who was majoring in Spanish—to translate for him. "Sí, señorita.

Have you ever thought about going into politics, Mr. Maxwell?" she asked archly as she snapped open her fan. She cooled herself in a manner that had no secret meaning that she knew of. Whoever invented the "language" of the fan should have been slapped. What if a lady simply wanted to cool herself and not send a message? "I fancy you'd be quite good at it." Kellan only smiled, taking no offense. Obviously he was too pleased with himself to regret the remark.

For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.

It's possible to name everything and to destroy the world.