Quotes About Language

Communication is not the preserve of humans; it is the one thing that is truly universal.

Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.

Paper may burn but words will escape.

I am a hill where poets run. I invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes who made letters with their legs. I am a lake upon a plain. I am a word in a tree. I am a hill of poetry. I am a raid on the inarticulate. I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale. For I am a still of poetry. I am a bank of song. I am a playerpiano in an abandoned casino on a seaside esplanade in a dense fog still playing.

Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.

There does not now, nor will there ever exist, a programming language in which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs.

Tricks with language allowed the foolish and ignorant to appear wise and knowledgeable

Don't you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? —George Orwell,

Writing" is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.

The aim of any literacy, and this literacy in particular, is to "empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express.

But the word more likely has a Greek origin, given that Greek was the language both of the earliest alchemical texts and of literate Greco-Roman Egypt. The "chem" of alchemy and chemistry very probably derives from the Greek che?, which means "to melt or fuse." Che? also gives rise to the Greek word chuma, which signifies an ingot of metal.

Analyzing the name of a thing can thus reveal something about the thing itself. The same thinking forms the basis of that branch of Jewish Kabbalah known as gematria, and its Christian versions that were explored in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.

To possess another language is to possess another soul.

Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.

Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country and a homeland are one and the same: nu'o'c.

The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages -- a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.

The involuntary poetry of one who is not fluent in the language.

A dry little laugh at the grotesquerie of using this stock phrase. At having occasion to use it.

How eagerly the words spring into shape, winding themselves around a rigid latticework of meaning like the curling tendrils of ivy that crisscross my window. The skeletal branches, whose intricate fretwork clings to the screen, hold tight against a lashing wind and pelting rain.

Before I continue with the scholarly account of tribalography, I want to tell you a Choctaw story. My tribe's language has a mysterious prefix that, when combined with other words, represents a form of creation. It is nuk or nok, and it has to do with the power of speech, breath, and mind. Things with nok or nuk attached to them are so powerful they create. For instance, nukfokechi brings forth knowledge and inspiration. A teacher is a nukfoki, the beginning of action.

Taal heeft te maken met de diepe natuur van de mens, de mens die is geschapen naar het beeld van God. God en de mens zijn geschapen tot gesprek