Quotes About Language

she wonders whether the Holy Ghost, conventionally represented as a dove, would not be better portrayed as a parrot. Logic is certainly on her side: parrots and Holy Ghosts can speak, whereas doves cannot.

The government had been talking about sexually transmitted disease. But it was the same with words: they too could be sexually transmitted.

Why should a word in a recipe be less important than a word in a novel? One can lead to physical indigestion, the other to mental. I

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of a much more recent origin than has heretofore been supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.

Th' poxy, slivey, cuntbitten shicers!

A murder of crows, a pride of lions, a judgment of ladies

You ought to choose fewer words that contain S for the time being. You are spitting all over me.

He wished for access to all the world's languages at once, for then he would have a better word for how he felt and what she was.

When she pulled it out, something tum- bled out along with it: a soft copper lock of her own hair. She went blank for a moment, thrown oddly off bal ance. The things lined up neatly on the floor in front of her were like words to a sentence in a language she had only begun learning, a sentence punctuated poignantly by a copper curl. They told a story Rebecca sensed she already half knew, she could feel it radiating, increasing in light, on the far reaches of her awareness.

Murmured to him nonsense, which is the language of love

I remember being called a pig. You do? You know good and well, I do. I was called a pig in two languages. You were? I was.

Later, your mother says, Didn't everything used to have a name?

Having an interpreter doesn't mean you are getting the right information. Immediately it should raise the red flag.

We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon

The intriguing thing about playing Scrabble is that as soon as the board is set up in front of me, I don't know any words. Other than cat and bat and rat, everything disappears from the language drawer in my brain. My mother, on the other hand, who normally speaks English like a regular person, spells things like qiviut (wool of the muskox) and hake.

We must make language accountable to the truths of our experience.

The Chinese language is extremely hard to learn. It is the only major linguistic system in the world that does not have an alphabet; and it is composed of numerous complicated characters – ideograms – which have to be memorised one by one and, moreover, are totally unrelated to sounds.

Motherfuckers will read a book that's one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we're taking over.

I'm also not sure exactly where and I when I got the language for who and what I am. I don't remember how I learned the words gay, homo(sexual), fag, queer, etc. I just seemed to have picked them up and undertsood what they meant.

Forms of expression that unnecessarily specify gender are widely regarded as sexist. In technical writing, sexist usage is easy to avoid.

His words were absorbed by the sand and blown by the wind, and there was no way of knowing how far they reached.

Lo invadió una tristeza como la luz del alba... Bien podían lamerse mutuamente las heridas. Pero, de persistir en las heridas que no se cierran nunca, terminarían por quedarse sin lengua.

Dac? ÅŸi gazeta era o fereastr? deschis? spre lumea din afar?, atunci geamul ei era îngheÅ£at.