Quotes About Language

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

I invented a new word today: plagiarism.

What all of what was then to be understood to be being presumed so makes something now recognizable as to what we were, in fact, then speaking of in speaking of 'whales'.

Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: "The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way round." "The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly. "Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I'm keeping you. Good-bye, Periel," and he was gone.

Is language all about desire? Is desire all about loss? Would we ever need to say anything if we never lost anything? Is everything we ever say just another way to express: I will lose this, I will lose all of this. I will lose you?

I don't know what I would do without you. I don't know what I will do without you. I learned about the future tense, how anxiety is encoded into our sentences, our conditionals, our thoughts, how worry is encoded into language itself, into grammar.

The apologies, the true sign—that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain

The sneaky heftiness of the book being the aggregate cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of individually insubstantial little markings, letters and numbers, commas and periods and colons and dashes, each symbol pressed upon the page by the printing machine with a slightly greater-than-expected force and darkness and permanence.

Open a window in the SRO on a summer night and you can hear at least five dialects being spoken, the voices bouncing up and down the central interior courtyard, the courtyard in reality just a vertical column of interior-facing windows,

The great shame of your life that you can't speak his language, not really, not fluently.

He says something you don't quite follow. You hear it, you catch most of the individual words, and yet somehow--you don't understand. This gap, always there. Somehow unbridgeable, whether it's across a wide Pacific gulf of language and culture, or just a simple sentence, father to son, always distance. The texture of everyday actions, simple movements and gestures, is harder than it looks. The great shame of your life that you can't speak his language, not really, not fluently.

I tell them to bring him in. He comes in smiling in triumph. And he can't speak English. After his hours of waiting we cannot talk. I feel rather sorry for him and we do our best. Finally, with the aid of about everyone in the hotel he manages to ask: "Do you like France?" "Yes," I answer. He is satisfied.

No such word as can't . No such word as babagoozle neither!

his native Russian, 'Do svidanja.' 'Do svidanja.

it is not news that we live in a world Where beauty is unexplainable And suddenly ruined And has its own routines. We are often far From home in a dark town, and our griefs Are difficult to translate into a language Understood by others.

It was not you, it was your eyes – I spoke to them.

The adjectives and derivatives based on woman's distinctions are alien and derogatory when applied to human affairs; "effeminate"--too female, connotes contempt, but has no masculine analogue; whereas "emasculate"--not enough male, is a term of reproach, and has no feminine analogue. 'Virile'--manly, we oppose to 'puerile'--childish, and the very world 'virtue' is derived from 'vir'--a man.

You can't translate something that was never in a language in the first place.

The first frictions and difficulties with the "northern giant" began immediately. These frictions were logi­cal if you consider that a country accustomed to special treatment suddenly saw that this little "colony" in the Caribbean irreverently sought to speak the only language a revolution can speak: the lan­guage of equal treatment.

I don't like the word 'alcoholic'. I like to think of myself as an advanced drinker.

I'm learning English at the moment. I can say 'Big Ben', 'Hello Rodney', 'Tower Bridge' and 'Loo'.

I can't place your accent." "Oh. I wasn't aware that I had one," I said coyly. I knew I didn't have one. I'd been in the Northwest long enough to have matched the bland diction that's so common there. Unless you want to argue that the absence of an accent is an accent in itself, in which case I'd have to kick you in the shins. And I can kick very hard.

It's as if there's no one at all working the drawbridge between his brain and his mouth.

There are stories hidden in the language we use, whether we're conscious of them or not. They tell the truth of our hearts and minds.