Quotes About Language

his consonants run together like anal beads strung from hell's own bunghole.

In my time we had very few words, perhaps a hundred that we used all the time, and thirty of them were synonyms for guilt.

Is "ho" always feminine, and "muthafucka" always masculine, while "bitch" can be either? How

I live in Chinatown," said Charlie, and although that was technically kinda-sorta true, he knew how to say exactly three things in Mandarin: Good day; light starch, please; and I am an ignorant white devil, all taught to him by Mrs. Ling. He believed the last to translate to "top of the morning to you.

The receptionist was a petite Asian woman of forty who spoke English so precisely that Tuck knew it had to be her second language.

Nicht, dass ich es dir verdenken könnte. Ich bin ausgesprochen koitabel – im Grunde das große Los. Eine Weile war ich sogar König.« »Wenn Worte Reichtum wären«, seufzte der Mohr. »Du wärst ein König unter Königen, aber im Moment bist du nur klein, nass und laut.«

Edle Herren, seid so freundlich und verpisst Euch.

Das Prinzip Moral verstehe ich nicht.« »Das überrascht mich nicht im geringsten.«

Quoi?" she had said, in perfect fucking French.

Eragon cried out, and in his desperation he reached for Saphira and the Eldunarí... and without meaning to, he drew from their stories of energy. And with that energy he cast a spell. It was a spell without words... His was a spell of instinct and emotion; language could not contain it.

another finger sign I'd never seen before

In the right hands, words can move more bricks than the strongest team of mules.

words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception.

The mind that relies on cliché does not really know what it is saying.

The effect of this was to make me abjure hackneyed expressions from an early age, so I suppose I benefited from my mother's phrasal insouciance in the long run, although it's possible that my automatic eschewal of clichés occasionally drove me from the Scylla of ridicule into the turbid Charybdisian eddies of sesquipedalian obfuscation...though I trust not.

I'd love to see what the women wear, then." "You wouldn't believe what your eyes were seeing – and don't ask me to describe it. I'd have to learn a whole new vocabulary first.

Communication, for

Prior to the rebellion the great mass of the people were satisfied to remain near the scenes of their birth. In fact an immense majority of the whole people did not feel secure against coming to want should they move among entire strangers. So much was the country divided into small communities that localized idioms had grown up, so that you could almost tell what section a person was from by hearing him speak.

Translation is the art of failure.

Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used to tell at all.

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus

but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.