Quotes About Language

I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English.

I started out in New York, and New York has a way of countering a Southern accent, naturally; when I moved to Los Angeles for a job, and I just stayed, the dialect out here doesn't really counter, and my Southern started coming back.

When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.

When I left Barcelona, staying in Spain was an important factor in my decision to join Madrid. I did not have to change country or learn a new language, adopt a different sort of lifestyle, and so on.

Other dances are like languages, like French or Spanish, but my steps are slang, and slang is always changing.

The way you speak should not determine your intelligence. I should be able to say 'lit,' and you still know I'm intelligent. I should be able to say 'turn up,' and that doesn't take away from my intelligence. I wanted to break down that stereotype a little bit.

Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Because I do not know the names of things, I do not express them.

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise — that which is common to you, me, and everybody.

Mark Lilla evokes the feeling well in a sympathetic 1998 summary of conservative thinking. It is not that anyone thinks that incivility, promiscuity, drug use, and irresponsibility are good things. But we have become embarrassed to criticize them unless we can couch our objections in the legalistic terms of rights, the therapeutic language of self-realization, or the economic jargon of efficiency.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis

No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.

Man sagt: gefallen«, verbessert die Mutter. »Als ob er hingefallen wäre? Das verstehe ich nicht. Er ist doch tot.« »Ja.« Der Vater hat sich eine Zigarette angezündet. »Viele sind tot, Hunderttausende liegen tot da draußen. Und vielleicht, weil man sich das nicht vorstellen mag, nennt man es so.«

Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon with them, but they are the money of fools.

Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.

We have conceived a new idea, Inglish. We will send the ito

Let what will be said or done, preserve your sangfroid immovably, and to every obstacle, oppose patience, perseverance, and soothing language.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.

As St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) taught, whatever we say about God is more unlike God than saying nothing. If we do say something, it can only be a pointer toward the Mystery that can never be articulated in words. All that words can do is point in the direction of the Mystery.

The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the earth's malice—a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out. The underground chambers were named "disinfection cellars," the aboveground chambers "bathhouses