Quotes About Language

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places...

There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.

Le parole possono essere precise anche al punto da apparire piatte, l'importante è che siano cariche di significato; se usate bene, possono toccare tutte le note.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?" Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. "Did he say 'whom'?" "Yeah, but don't hit him," I said. "There is such a word." Degarmo licked his lips. "I knew there was," he said. "I often wondered where they kept it.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her . . . that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

I've found that there are only two kinds [of slang] that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passé before it gets into print.

Mexican band always makes. Whatever they play, it all sounds the same. They always sing the same song, and it always has nice open vowels and a drawn out sugary lilt, and the guy who sings it always strums on a guitar and has a lot to say about amor, mi corazón, a lady who is "linda" but very hard to convince, and he always has too long and too oily hair

Fejezzük be ezt a beszélgetést. Túlságosan sok benne a felkiáltójel.

C'est en écrivant qu'on devient écriveron

Le duc finit son verre, puis énonça cette remarque : — Ce qui me plaît dans l'essence de fenouil, c'est qu'il n'y a aucun autre mot qui rime avec. Avec fenouil. — À moins qu'on ne change de genre, dit Lalix.

Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can "infinitize" us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the "small group of people.

Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded.

Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.

They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase what has happened, silence the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorize people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so impossible or dangerous they stop trying, you can perpetuate your crimes.

To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism.

the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.