Quotes About Language

Contempt, thought Tyrion, the universal tongue.

She had surrendered her virtue at six-and-ten, to a beautiful blond-haired sailor on a trading galley up from Lys. He only knew six words of the Common Tongue, but "fuck" was one of them—the very word she'd hoped to hear.

May," said Dany. That was such a slippery word, may. In any language.

Sing to me in the language of leviathan, that I may know his name.

Words are not swords.

Hodor's real name was Walder. No one knew where "Hodor" had come from, she said, but when he started saying it, they started calling him by it. It was the only word he had.

No beast was as noisy as man.

They bought clams and cockles from her, told her true tales of Braavos and lies about their lives, and laughed at the way she talked when she tried to speak Braavosi.

Theon Greyjoy had once commented that Hodor did not know much, but no one could doubt that he knew his name. Old Nan had cackled like a hen when Bran told her that, and confessed that Hodor's real name was Walder. No one knew where "Hodor" had come from, she said, but when he started saying it, they started calling him by it. It was the only word he had.

Weigh every word before you speak it.

Drinkwater had a swagger to him, a confidence bordering on arrogance. He never seemed ill at ease, and even when he did not speak the language, he had ways of making himself understood.

Tell Khal Drogo that he has given me the wind.

There is no such thing as Negro dialect, except in literature and drama.

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous in speculation, as in politics, to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

The little word is has its tragedies; it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger. Whenever I use the word is, except in sheer tautology, I deeply misuse it; and when I discover my error, the world seems to fall asunder and the members of my family no longer know one another.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

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We take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and that one cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take therefore the form of distinction for the form.

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.