Quotes About Language

The Book does not play James Joyce with the Universe.

Personally, I'd like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it's going to be so overloaded with meanings it's just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink.

It's not Sci-Fi, we insist, It's SF. Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.

Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we're talking now, not factuality but possibility.

Cause what do groanhuffs know? All's they've done is heard our tales and passed em along in a game of Chinese Whispers, getting em all mixed up, like.

Fuck, if only 'aesthetic idiom' didn't sound so damn poncy.

My mother calls once a year to ask when I'm going back to studies. This is Croatian slang for "the money's up.

A trebuit sa ma multumesc cu a mi se spune Erra, caci atunci cand zeul limbii le-a dat francezilor alfabetul, litera h a ramas incuiata in biblioteca, iar francezii sufera de pe urma acestei pierderi si azi. Pentru ei, heroian e eroina, iar hotelul e otel.

To read forward Why should Europeans not be able to read, even when we write in the language they understand? They cannot read because they (as "Europeans," caught in the snare of an exhausted but self-nostalgic metaphor) are assimilating what they read back into that snare and into what they already know – and are thus incapable of projecting it forward into something they may not know and yet might be able to learn.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

Don't ever diminish the power of words. Words move hearts and hearts move limbs.

The written English we want is clean, clear prose. I choose my words carefully – not elegant, not stylish, just clean, clear prose. It means simplifying, polishing and tightening.

every word, every sentence, has three possible meanings: what the speaker intends it to mean, what the hearer understands it to mean, and what it is commonly understood to mean.

Write so simply that any other officer who knows nothing of the subject can still understand you. To do this, avoid confusion and give words their ordinary meanings.

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language

Latin texts and "tried on" various nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, inventing new ones along the way; in the process he would have acquired his vocabulary of some 25,000 words, more than twice the size of the one possessed by John Milton.

Let me advise thee not to talk of thyself as being old. There is something in Mind Cure, after all, and if thee continually talks of thyself as being old, thee may perhaps bring on some of the infirmities of age. At least I would not risk it if I were thee.

Not for nothing did phrases like 'he who marries for love has good nights and bad days' and insults like 'cunt-struck,' the eighteenth-century equivalent of saying that someone was thinking with his dick, survive into the Victorian age.

What is at stake here is a totally new unity of form, meaning and feeling: language-images that cannot simply be thought up or written up … They constitute new, multifaceted objects, resembling polyplanes made of mirrors … As if the illogical was relaxation, as if laughter was permitted while thinking, as if error was a way and chance, a proof of eternity.

Das, was wirklich ist, kann man mit Wörtern ohnehin immer nur annähernd beschreiben; ein Wort ist eben nie genau die Sache selber.

Anlams?zl?k habis bir sözcüktür. En uç a??r?l?klara bile hak tan?yan bir serzeniÅŸi adland?r?r. Bu nedenle tehlikeli de bir sözcüktür. Sadece bir eksiklikliÄŸi ima etmez, ayn? zamanda bir k?s?tlamay?, asli bir ÅŸeyin çal?nd???n? düÅŸündürür, ki bu da bir suçlu aramay? tümüyle hakl? k?lar, eÄŸer ortada bir suç varsa tabii.

However, I am fairly confident that the extent of our eschatological transfiguration will be much more thoroughgoing than many of us suspect and that even our biblical language will literally prove infinitely inadequate to the task of describing the earthly reality that will have been transformed or divinized into our heavenly .6

Where words fail, music speaks.

Poetska re? je jednako kao i filozofska u stanju da stoji i da se u odvojenosti "teksta" u kome se artikuliše iskaže sa sopstvenim autoritetom. "Filozofija i poezija