Quotes About Language

I don't need to kill goats to say things. I CAN talk.

I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.

Cliff said "damn" for me (I'm going to die). I didn't know he liked me enough to swear.

I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.

To speak and to offend is with some people but one and the same thing.

Great things only require to be simply told, for they are spoiled by emphasis; but little things should be clothed in lofty language, as they are only kept up by expression, tone of voice, and style of delivery.

People would never fall in love if they had not heard love talked about.

The character of a man's native country is as strongly impressed on his mind as its accent is on his tongue.

Ils ont treize noms pour nommer le palmier, et le palmier n'est pas nommé.

Words made faerie tales.

In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland are one and the same: nu'ó'c.

The vulgar Turk is very different from what is spoken at court, 'tis as ridiculous to make use of the expressions commonly used in speaking to a great man or lady, as it would be to talk broad Yorkshire or Somershetshire in the drawing room.

At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version and this is the great literary monument of the English language.

As with many American conversations, the words he spoke had not conveyed what he had intended by them. He could never decide if it was his English, his actual use of language, or if it was because people didn't really listen and instead put into the words they heard the words they expected to hear.

name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world.

My whole life has been lived in-between -- in between languages, in between cultures, in between countries ... My life resisted the kind of easy categories that the head of state had outlined for everyone. Surely, I told myself, a nation was a community, with views that are by necessity different, often divergent, and occasionally contradictory. Surely, true allegiance meant speaking up when something wasn't right.

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things: fairy tales, dead languages, weird folk beliefs, fascinating religions, and more.

This is Weep. You can't expect things to make sense here." Thyon didn't agree. "I expect they make perfect sense," he said. "Just under a different set of rules." It was a matter of learning the rules, like learning a new language.

In truth, she had claim to no nationality. Her papers were all forgeries, and her accents -all except one, in her first language, which was not of human origin- were all fakes.

His mind traced the arabesques and coils of an alphabet that looked like music sounded.

Her Czech was freshly acquired (by wish, not study; Karou collected languages, and that's what Brimstone always gave her for her birthday) and it had still tasted strange on her tongue, like a new spice.

Karoo significa esperanza

an apostrophe humbled to a comma.