Quotes About Language

It's hard to describe one's own alchemy that makes one into a writer, but I definitely think American language is so interesting, and specifically Southern language and black Southern language; it's hard to separate Southern language from black language.

What I learned through my research is that the word 'actor,' specifically in reference to those who performed in plays, came about in the late 1500s as a non-gendered word. It applied to all people, regardless of anatomical sex or gender identity.

There's a specificity of language that's required in Shakespeare that most drama students in England deal with - a specificity of language that is somehow not as clear in a lot of American schools.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

The power of real debate is in the language and intellectual honesty of the debaters, alongside the engagement of spectators.

Kids don't talk like adults, but kids on the spectrum don't necessarily fall into the same patterns of speaking or have the same interests as other kids their age.

The accent of one's birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart as in one's speech.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Speech is the mirror of the soul.

Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.

Speech happens to not be his language.

The definition of hate speech in some countries is problematic.

Lately I've been believing that music predates speech.

In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.

The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.

One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.

It definitely sharpened my interest in language, the way people used language, slang words, speech patterns. There's a big advantage to being the outsider.

Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.

Not being able to read and write music is not the same as being illiterate in speech and writing.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.

You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech.