Quotes About Language

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

he didn't needs words or even want them because he knew how they could lie, could heat your blood and disappear.

You revel in the smoke that the words send up.

The complexity of the so-called individual that's been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the 'me'. When I was a young girl we were called citizens – American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did – consume. Now they don't use those words any more – it's the American taxpayer and those are different attitudes.

The visionary language of the doomed reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which language of the blessed and saved cannot compete.

How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home? How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling? They are questions of concept, of language, of trajectory, of habitation, of occupation, and, although my engagement with them has been fiece, fitful, and constantly (I think) evolving, they remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and pollitically unresolved.

It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby, for redemption. (227)

To use folk language, vernacular in a manner neither exotic nor comic, neither minstrelized nor microscopically analyzed.

Writing of, about, and within a world committed to racial dominances without employing the linguistic strategies that supported it seemed to me the most urgent, fruitful, challenging work a writer could take on.

She heard it as though it were what language was made for

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all by themselves with no help from the mind.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more attention is given to hell rather than heaven. Dante's Inferno beats out Paradisio every time. Milton's brilliantly rendered pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than his Paradise. The visionary language of the doomed reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which language of the blessed and saved cannot compete.

We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

The novel, I believe, allows, encourages ways to experience the public – in time, with affect, in a communal space, with other people (characters), and in language that insists on individual participation. It also tries to illuminate and recover the relationship between literature and public life.

If scientific language is about longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if religious language is discredited as contempt for the nonreligious; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if market language is merely an excuse for inciting greed; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom but "upgrade," where might we look for humanity's own future?

The words dance in my head to the music in my mouth.

there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You've done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

for one's language, the one we dream in, is home.

They say, "Listen to your body," but I have found that pain doesn't speak in complete sentences; its grasp of grammar is weak. Its pronunciation is unclear.

in the arena of economic policy, the citizens of today's democracies have learned altogether too much modesty. We have been advised that these are matters for experts: that economics and its policy implications are far beyond the understanding of the common man or woman—a point of view enforced by the increasingly arcane and mathematical language of the discipline.

Our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things any more. For the last thirty years, when asking ourselves whether we support a policy, a proposal or an initiative, we have restricted ourselves to issues of profit and loss - economic questions in the narrowest sense. But this is not an instinctive human condition: it is an acquired taste.

Worse, the language of politics itself has been vacated of substance and meaning.

we have smuggled in a misleadingly 'ethical' vocabulary to bolster our economic arguments