Quotes About Language

Llamas a las cosas por otro nombre como si así combinaras lo que son. Pero eso no las convierte en verdad.

Con el tiempo les fueron quitando a palos las palabras del otro lado del océano. Por simplificar, por borrarles la identidad, por sofocar revueltas.

Who knew what brand of mutiny his captives might cook up if they shared a common tongue.

Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don't make them true.

There was a message there, if he could teach himself the language.

Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.

There was something in the music of the accent that Douglass liked: it was as if the Cork people put long lazy hammocks in their sentences.

Are you saying I'm a liar? --No I'm just, like, speaking.

How very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit.

There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?

Without you, she wrote in Hebrew, I am without any depth, I am on the surface here, waiting.

It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences.

To summon things into being by the mysterious alchemy of language. Atlantic. Atlas. Aloft. He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under.

Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.

Worte können sein wie winzige Arsendosen: sie werden unbemerkt verschluckt, sie scheinen keine Wirkung zu tun, und nach einiger Zeit ist die Giftwirkung doch da.

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?" In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?

Logos is a Greek word which denotes meaning.

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?

el acto del amor y el acto del conocimiento se designaran en hebreo con la misma palabra.

Seit ich weiss, dass man mit Text nichts mitteilen kann, kann ich Texte verstehen.

Texts do not signify the world, they signify the images they tear up. Hence, to decode texts, means to discover the images dignified by them

words were nothing but foolery and cheating.

When, soon, they join in their happy wedding-bonds— and wedded let them be—in pacts of peace at last, never command the Latins, here on native soil, to exchange their age-old name, to become Trojans, called the kin of Teucer, alter their language, change their style of dress. Let Latium endure.

The merging of characteristics between different species creates a very powerful language, one that I love to explore through my art, enabling me to tap into the unconscious.