Quotes About Language

le plus ancien encore à venir ~ elle ne parle pas l'innommée or tu l'entends mieux que moi avant moi en ce moment même

One can, of course, speak several languages. There are speakers who are competent in more than one language. Some even write several languages at a time (prostheses, grafts, translation, transposition) . But do they not always do it with a view to an absolute idiom? and in the promise of a still unheard-of language? of a sole poem previously inaudible?

by this very forgetting, he arrives at a sense for truth.

Jacques Derrida

simply one problem among others.

Limiting the potencies of repetition to presence

to what Derrida, following Husserl, calls "the relation to the object" [84])

Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the image than to the object.—J.-J. Rousseau, Fragment inédit d'un essai sur les langues

Eventually, Morrison realized that work was the only language the two men shared. When he wasn't talking about RIM, Lazaridis was rhapsodic about technology breakthroughs and quantum physics. Balsillie's enthusiasms were sports, traveling, and business celebrities who were starting to pay attention to BlackBerry's founders.

I do wish you'd break the careless habit of using the word American as if you had stolen it from the rest of us. Use norteamericano, because we Cubans and Mexicans and Uruguayans, we're also Americans.

The opening sentence alone contained thirty-six words—monstrous

The Aleutian word for Great Land was Alaxsxaq, and when Europeans reached the Aleutian Islands, their first stopping point in this portion of the arctic, and asked the people what name the lands hereabout had, they replied "Alaxsxaq," and in the European tongues this became Alaska.

It's Elvish, Tummeler repeated. It says, basically, 'Declare allegiance, and be welcomed. Well, doesn't it perhaps mean that the magic word that opens the door is 'allegiance'? Said Jack. In Elvish? That's a stupid idea, said John. Then anyone who spoke Elvish could get in.

So speak to influence. Don't speak to call a flower yellow. Speak

If dirty words frighten you...I really don't know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.

It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. (You taught me language, says Caliban to Prospero, and my profit on't is I know how to curse.)

You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.

The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has no mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; and this means that he has no grasp of the reality of the people around him.

If dirty words frighten you," said Giovanni, "I really do not know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.

And he knew again that she was not saying everything she meant; in a kind of secret language she was telling him today something that he must remember and understand tomorrow

He wasn't anybody's n*****. And that's a crime, in this fucking free country. You're suppose to be somebody's n*****. And if you're nobody's n*****, you're a bad n*****...

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.

For the horrors of the American Negro's life there has been almost no language.... And, in fact, the truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

I've never come across any shame down here, except shame like mine, except the shame of the hardworking black ladies, who call me Daughter, and the same of proud Puerto Ricans, who don't understand what's happened—no one who speaks to them speaks Spanish, for example—and who are ashamed that they have loved ones in jail.