Quotes About Language

Superbia, Acedia, Luxuria, Ira, Gula, Invidia, Avaritia. The seven deadly sins. That's the extent of my Latin.

You're his what?" "Amanuensis.

What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears?

I could see the two of us in the round mirror on the wall, our long hair down, our blue eyes. Norsewomen. When I saw us like this, I could almost remember fishing in cold deep seas, the smell of cod, the charcoal of our fires, our felt boots and our strange alphabet, runes like sticks, a language like the ploughing of fields.

but for poetry one needs one's native tongue. The voice of the soul is not so easily translated.

Solo perchè un poeta dice qualcosa non significa che sia vero, ma solo che suona bene.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific—chair, eye, stone—but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

Language, at least, may give up the secrets of life and death, leading us through the maze to the original Word as monster or angel, to the mournful place where we may meet Job and hear his cry, 'How long will you vex my soul and break me in pieces with words?

I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between trichotomy and trick. Now what do you think of that? It was only a few minutes walk to trigger, then over the page to trinity, trinket and trional, and there my cousin used to fall asleep.

But it is imperative, for our own survival, that we avoiid one another, and what more successful means of avoidance are there than words? Language will keep us safe from human onslaught, will express for us our regret at being unable to supply groceries or love or peace.

Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language.

Nouns and verbs hold the power but syntax casts the spell.

Post-'Pellichoopulu,' I received a lot of offers from Tamil industry. I decided I won't do a Tamil film unless I know the language. If I want to do it, I wanted to do it perfectly.

Kannada was easy for me to learn because it's casual and easy; no frills, unlike Tamil.

Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid marveled at the electability of Barack Obama because, unlike previous black candidates, Mr. Obama was 'light-skinned' and lacked a 'Negro dialect.'

Increasingly, corporate executives who don't speak Japanese are coming into Japan. Unlike their predecessors, they expect their employees to be able to communicate in English.

Unlike the issue of messiahhood, which arose when Jews and Christians were members of the same religio-political community and spoke the same conceptual language, the issues of the incarnation and the Trinity divide people who are no longer members of the same community and who no longer speak the same language.

English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right - as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet.

I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me.

Poems, unlike songs, are written to be read and, thus, come equipped with their own rhythms and melodies; they're self-contained entities, the whole shebang.

Unlike our neighbours on the mainland of Europe, we have resisted creating an academy to legislate over proper English. We each have our linguistic bugbear, but few of us would want to freeze our mother tongue.

A sentence that clots in your mouth is unlikely to flow in your mind.