Quotes About Language

It was as if words were now a wall between people rather than a bridge, and if you could just build the wall high enough no one would see the growing desert of the vanished on the other side. It was as though everyone was using words to avoid using words for what words were used for.

There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you?

I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.

No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.

I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.

the tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth.

It's easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don't bring you oysters. (Paul Child)

In fact, I didn't like traveling first class at all. Yes, it was nice to have a bathroom in a hotel and fine service at breakfast...but none of it seemed foreign enough for me. It was all so pleasantly bland that I felt as if I were back on the SS America. I don't like it when everyone speaks perfect English; I'd much rather struggle with my phrasebook.

Tossing the chalk thoughtfully for a moment, I decided what to do. I wrote 'The cat sat on the mat' once in copperplate English, then translated into Latin, then French and finally, for good measure, in Italian.

Everything has its way of speaking and telling things worth knowing. Even the little grass-blades have their way of saying things as plain as words when human lips let them fall...the choice bits of wisdom...were never written down in any books.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony – perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped – might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes.

Poets don't run out of material the way novelists do because they don't depend on material in the same way.

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.

It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.

It is only a metaphor—or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events.

Flaubert le salían las palabras con facilidad; pero también supo ver la insuficiencia subyacente de la Palabra. Recuérdese su triste definición en Madame Bovary: «La palabra humana es como una caldera rota en la que tocamos melodías para que bailen los osos, cuando quisiéramos conmover a las estrellas.»

Her diction was formal, her sentence structure entirely grammatical—indeed, you could almost hear the commas, semicolons and full stops.

Monoglot, the sign of an enclosed and self-deluding country.

The parrot/writer feebly accepts language as something received, imitative and inert

He died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper. Paper, ideas, phrases, metaphors, structured prose which turns into sound.

I keep alive our lost private language.