Quotes About Language

Noa Noah shook his head and grinned. "He no savvee me Tahitian," he explained.  "He savvee me wear pants all the same white man." "You'll have to give him a course in 'Sartor Resartus,'" Sheldon laughed, as he came down and began to make friends with Satan. It chanced just then that Adamu Adam and Matauare, two of Joan's

You forget how I talked when you first met me. I have learned a new language since then. Before that time I talked as that girl talks. Now I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in your language to explain that you do not know that other girl's language.

The utmost accolade a writer can receive is that the reader is incognizant of his presence. The writer must put no obstacles in the reader's way. Therefore I try avoid words that he must puzzle over, or that he cannot gloss from context; and when I make up names, I shun the use of diacritical marks that he must sound out, thus halting the flow; and in general, I try to keep the sentences metrically pleasing, so that they do not obtrude upon the reader's mind.

There is too much knowledge already in the world; we use facts as crutches, logic is deceit. I know a single system of communication: the declaiming of poetry.

called aral, "island," in Mongolian.

But it is of critical importance to ask ourselves what features which other animals do not possess have given human beings the very special capacities with which we are concerned in these lectures: the ability to utter cognitive sentences (which no other animal can do) and the ability therefore to exercise knowledge and imagination.

Poetry glories in excess. When it's not extolling the virtues of austerity.

Glielo spiegai; non a parole, ma nel linguaggio della carne, di labbra, lingua e mani, del respiro accelerato e del pulsare del sangue nelle vene, nell'umore salato del desiderio. È la stessa domanda che poniamo alla nostra esistenza, e anche la risposta è sempre la stessa. Il mistero non è nella domanda e neppure nella risposta, ma nel continuare a domandarsi e a rispondersi, perché la fine è generata dall'inizio.

Poor licklewickle cry-baby buggy-wuggy,' she muttered.

I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them then blow gently, watch them float right out of my hands.

We hear them continually on TV: hence they occur first when it is our turn to talk. In this regard, talk may be said to be the enemy of writing. If you observe yourself when on the point of writing that the word rising spontaneously to your mind is not the hard, clear words of a lover of plain speech, but this mush of counterfeits and cliches.

The lie is the future, one may venture to say [...]. To tell the truth is, on the contrary, to say what is or what will have been and it would instead prefer the past.

Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it—which always amounts to the same.

There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.

the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum .

Be alert to these invisible quotation marks, even within a word.

Speech frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much.

Er is niets buiten de tekst.

One of the meanings of what is called a victim ( a victim of anything or anyone whatsoever) is precisely to be erased in its meaning as victim. The absolute victim is a victim who cannot even protest. One cannot even identify the victim as victim. He or she cannot even present himself or herself as such. He or she is completely covered by language, annihilated by history, a victim one cannot identify.

the constancy of God in my life is called by other names, so that I quite rightly pass for an atheist

The means are a technology of the sign, the "technical mastery" of the sign (65).

Language being the break with madness, it adheres more thoroughly to its essence and vocation, makes a cleaner break with madness, if it pits itself against madness more freely and gets closer and closer to it: to the point of being separated from it only by the "transparent sheet" of which Joyce speaks, that is, by itself—for this diaphaneity is nothing other than the language, meaning, possibility, and elementary discretion of a nothing that neutralizes everything.

as if perception and thought were independent of the sign

ELLE NE PARLE PAS L'INNOMMÉE OR TU L'ENTENDS MIEUX QUE MOI AVANT MOI EN CE MOMENT MÊME