Quotes About Language

A beautiful woman combining the prospect of happiness and nakedness in the same spoken sentence could achieve the power of the greatest lyric poetry.

Actually, I can see one advantage to the Western way of thinking, which is that if someone has a name, you know what to call them, don't you? It's only one small advantage, and there are millions of big disadvantages, including the biggest one of all, which is that names are really fascist and don't allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing.

How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you just have to put a fuck.

But enough already of what grammarians will recognize as the third conditional: if + pluperfect + would.

I'm beginning to feel more embarrassed about the conversation than about anything we've just done. Horny? They really use that word? Jesus. All my life I've wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I have, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often. Apart from Americans, that is, who probably go to bed with Americans all the time.

When you're as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English-speaking world seems like a minor infraction.

I should have said any of those things. I should have used at least one obscenity. I should certainly have threatened him with violence.

If there wasn't an English word for it, though, then it was probably work best avoided, at least until she was really desperate. The

Love and charity share the same root word (caritas). How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggest they cannot coexist, that they are antiethical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart?

the I who cannot understand certain words and translate them into actions) is now somehow within the IF world, counseling the player character not to eat a piece of direct mail.

She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn't there.

When she thought at all, she thought in British, the language of the high places, of wild and wary and watchful things. A language of resistance and elliptical thoughts.

The French, than whom - it's a very than-whom people all round - none can be more vacuously orotund, are (the same ones) obligingly terse. On occasion.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.

Now we'd known each other for two years, the side of my calf was touching his shins, and his stomach was against my ribs. He said, I don't think it's end of world to be my girlfriend. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.

Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.

The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

as a rule of thumb, whenever there appears a plural, correct for a singular. Should I ever let slip a royal WE, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.

and at the table next to her was a little boy in a soccer uniform sitting with his mother who told him, The plural of elf is elves. A wave of happiness came over me. It felt giddy to be part of it all. To be drinking a cup of coffee like a normal person. I wanted to shout out: The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

19. THE WALL OF DICTIONARIES BETWEEN MY MOTHER AND THE WORLD GETS TALLER EVERY YEAR Sometimes pages of the dictionaries come loose and gather at her feet, shallon, shalop, shallot, shallow, shalom, sham, shaman, shamble, like the petals of an immense flower. When I was little, I thought that the pages on the floor were words she would never be able to use again, and I tried to tape them back in where they belonged, out of fear that one day she would be left silent.

Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow.

At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.

It's also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it - just to name it - must have been like trying to catch something invisible. (pg 107)