Quotes About Language

You really have to love words if you're going to be a writer, because as a writer, you certainly spend a lot of time with words.

They've really begun the war, he said to himself. And all over a word in a dictionary, the ninnies!

Frost wrote, "is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don't know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. . .

je le sens très bien,mais je ne sais pas l'exprimer...je n'ai à ma disposition que de pauvres mots complètement usés à force d'avoir servi à tous et à tout...

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

Thou shalt say a thousand things, and saying them a thousand times over, thou shalt still have said nothing!

All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language.

in our day, the very A B C has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter.

I can communicate in 6,909 living and dead languages. I can have more than fifteen billion simultaneous conversations, and be fully engaged in every single one. I can be eloquent, and charming, funny, and endearing, speaking the words you most need to hear, at the exact moment you need to hear them. Yet even so, there are unthinkable moments where I can find no words, in any language, living or dead. And in those moments, if I had a mouth, I might open it to scream.

schwa : The faint vowel sound in many unstressed syllables in the English language. It is signified by the pronunciation uh and represented by the symbol upside down e. For example, the e in overlook , the a in forgettable , and the o in run-of-the-mill . It is the most common vowel sound in the English language.

Carl was just saying good-bye, Mom said. Really, I said. He must speak in tongues.

That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck.

Now he's far away, floating in the clouds, playing Scrabble with the Dalai Lama, but wouldn't you know it, all the tiles are in Tibetan.

The things I feel cannot be put into words, or if they can, the words are in no language anyone can understand.

Ah. That's Tonist code for, 'Leave me the hell alone,' " Curate Mendoza says. "You might also try, 'I wish to ponder the resonance.' That works just as well.

Language secretly pushes and prods every one of us in hundreds of directions we don't see, until the only way to be careful with your words is to never speak.

Carl was just saying goodbye, Mom said. Really, I said. He must speak in tongues.

Now he's far away, floating in the clouds, playing Scrabble with the Dalai Lama, but wouldn't you know it, all the tiles are in Tibetan.

Las personas son nombres, las acciones son verbos. Peras y olmos.

It was Hayden who actually came up with the therm Whollies because Unwind and AWOL were negative labels put on them by the world.

Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere to a higher plane, and purify yourself by drinking as if it were ambrosia the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness. Free from the futile strivings and the cares which dim existence to a realm of mist, happy is he who wings an upward way on mighty pinions to the fields of light; whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked, outreaches life and readily comprehends the language of flowers and of all mute things.

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

But how you'd please me, night! without those stars Whose light speaks in a language I have known! Since I seek for the black, the blank, the bare!

He whose thoughts, like skylarks, Toward the morning sky take flight —Who hovers over life and understands with ease The language of flowers and silent things!