Quotes About Language

By the time they got home, they were both thoroughly bilingual in cursing. *

I suppose your evaluation of his intelligence is just right." "Such a Goldilocks line. Makes me feel so…ursine." "Why can't you just say 'bearlike'?" "Because I know the word 'ursine,' and so do you, and it's fun to say.

He understood all the words, he just had no clue what was going on. The Aunts said what they meant. Or at least they meant what they said.

I speak to everyone in the language they understand," said Ender. "That isn't being slick. It's being clear.

sesquipedalian bushwa.

French, with their arrogant Separatism, insisted that the teaching of Standard not begin until the age of four, when the French language patterns were already set. His accent made him exotic and interesting; his broken arm made him a martyr; his sadism made him a natural focus for all those who loved pain in others.

Hay periodos en que el mundo se reestructura, y en esos períodos las palabras precisas pueden cambiar el mundo.

You're Greek and I'm Armenian. Of course we need to raise our children to speak Portuguese.

It was a language he had learned too late for it to come naturally to him. He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent. The

You think—I dare say that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it We're destroying words—scores of them hundreds of them every day. It's a beautiful thing the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms there are also the antonyms.

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Life is too short to learn German

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.

Everyone quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand.

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other - by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.

We have words but sometimes they're not enough.

There is nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty of the world than language.