Quotes About Language

He left a quote I need—" "A quotation, Mr. Marlow. 'Quote' is a verb. 'Quotation' is a noun.

The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.

Number is different from quantity.

There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitiveand getting away with itis far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun.

The way the word sinks into the deep snow of the page

If shadows could talk they would tell us everything we know already but in the melodious language of tears in which every third word rhymes. from "Some Notes on Shadows

because you've chosen poetry, you're condemned to wonder at skills and felicities of language or imagination in the poems of others that you yourself may never achieve, no matter how hard you work toward them—things that will always be beyond your reach but also will always be luring you on.

A French writer once said that prose is walking, poetry is dancing. That's a fine metaphor for the pleasurable intensification of emotion, language, and rhythm that is at the heart of poetry.

If manipulators of language (and people) use words and phrases to put their listeners under a spell, then poets are people who are themselves under the spell of language.

I'm actually after another notion here—what I've called Quest. Quest has to do with the intersection of your own personal life and the art of poetry in your time and place. It has to do with what you want to do with poetry and what poetry wants to do with you. It has to do with coming to understand who you are and who you hope to be when you are reborn through language and imagination as a poet.

They said "whar" for where, "thar "for there, "critter" for creature, "nekkid" for naked, "wider" for widow, and "younguns" for young ones. They were always "fixin" to do something, or go "sparkin" instead of courting, and the younguns "growed up" instead of grew up. Children were referred to as "little shits".

It was the invention in the music that was so striking —the will to create what had never been heard before, through vocal tricks, rhythmic shifts, pieces of sound that didn't logically follow one from the other, that didn't make musical or even emotional sense when looked at as pieces, but as a whole spoke a new language.

Never start a sentence with the words 'No offense.

Whoever named it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.

Most people in Iceland are either referred to as the son or daughter of their father. For example, a woman with a father named John is Johnsdaughter, or in Icelandic Jonsdottir. A man with a father named John is Johnsson, or Jonsson in Icelandic.

By exclaiming that "there are no absolute truths" the postmodern stance is also claiming that the statement it just made is an absolute truth—trying to have it both ways, rejecting absolutism with absolutism.

If you decide to design your own language, there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer pitfalls.

O mouths humanity seeks a new language Beyond the reach of grammarians.

You see before you a man in his right mind Worldly-wise and with access to death Having tested the sorrow of love and its ecstasies Having sometimes even astonished the professors Good with languages Having travelled a great deal Having seen battle in the Artillery and the Infantry Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform Having lost my best friends in the butchery As much of antiquity and modernity as can be known I know

At present, under the burden of canons and the burden of language's deep complicity with countless atrocities, the very making of poems requires audacity. And if the audacity is well-intended, it requires a certain awkwardness as proof of its unrehearsed refusal to comply with silence.

En poésie nous avons des droits sur les paroles qui forment et défont l'Univers.

La palabra asusta al poder.

sobre la necesidad de proteger y difundir la herbolaria indígena como una práctica médica válida. Podrías reclamar los derechos de los mapuches en la Araucanía frente a las invasiones de sus tierras por colonos blancos. Defenderías la preservación de las lenguas nativas.

Usté me va a perdonar, pero apenas entiendo lo que dice. A nosotros ya no nos gusta hablar la lengua mexicana.» ¿Cuánto se perdió en el camino para que esa mujer se haya alienado de su idioma y por tanto, de su identidad? Tú la hubieras reprendido. La lengua es el último baluarte de la resistencia.