Quotes About Language

Penetra surdamente no reino das palavras Lá estão os poemas que esperam ser escritos.

we had it on a cake. Keik. Or more properly, in that relaxed, African Spanish of Cuba, kei. That's what we called them, keikes, or keiis, in the plural. Not tortas or pasteles, the proper Spanish names. Never, ever, ever did we call a cake a bollo, as in other Spanish-speaking countries. In Cuba bollo had somehow evolved into the swear word for a woman's

People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.

I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.

Ireland has the oldest literature in Europe in a native language.

Even though language has its richness the relationship between language and the writer is always like a stone and you have to make the stone human.

It was easy for me to understand this language of blood, pain, and creation that begins with physical substance itself when one is a woman.

Mi patria escabrosa y recóndita, siempre esperando por mí. Riachuelos por cuya corriente huyen los peces rojos del pretérito imperfecto, montañas dentadas de gerundios, cuestas a rribas flanqueadas por signos de admiración y puntos suspensivos, angostos desfiladeros donde se hila la oración compuesta, árboles frondosos de adjetivos o desnudos de ellos, praderas atisbadas en sueños y a las que sólo se llega por el puente inestable del condicional.

La vida, hasta cuando la vemos mas negra, puede ofrecernos estas compensaciones lingüísticas capaces de arrancarnos una sonrisa momentánea.

La mentira y el deterioro se suelen colar a través de los adverbios del tiempo.

Many people believe that if they use big words—capacious, voluminous, consequential language—others will find their use of such words to be a sign of intelligence. The exact opposite is true. If you want to sound smart and confident, replace big words with small ones. Big words don't impress people; big words frustrate people.

Great speakers use short words to explain new ideas.

Content written at the eighth-grade level can be read and understood by 80 percent of Americans.

According to Tufte, "By leaving out the narrative between the points, the bullet outline ignores and conceals the causal assumptions and analytic structure of the reasoning." A list of bullet points is a presenter's way of compressing language into brief phrases. Bulleted outlines "might be useful now and then," Tufte writes, "but sentences with subjects and verbs are usually better.

The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.

The Latin names of plants blur like belief.

When did your name change from a proper noun to a charm? Its three vowels like jewels on the thread of my breath. Its consonants brushing my mouth like a kiss. I love your name. I say it again and again in this summer rain. I see it, discreet in the alphabet, like a wish. I pray it into the night till its letters are light. I hear your name rhyming, rhyming, rhyming with everything. "Name

his touch a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

We live in a culture that has institutionalized the oppression of animals on at least two levels: in formal structures such as slaughterhouses, meat markets, zoos, laboratories, and circuses, and through our language. That we refer to meat eating rather than to corpse eating is a central example of how our language transmits the dominant culture's approval of this activity.

When vegetarians attempt to disarm the dominant control of language, they are seen as picky, particular, embittered, self righteous, confrontative, and especially sentimental.

Shut the eff up,' Aaron said. Only he said the REAL swear, the REAL word.

If we do not mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery, then why should there be any objections to using female imagery and pronouns as well?

Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male?