Quotes About Language

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

My one quarrel is with words.

Es una triste verdad, pero hemos perdido la capacidad de dar nombres bonitos a las cosas. Los nombres lo son todo.

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

From childhood he had been devoted to whatever was useless, metamorphosing the streetcar rattle of life into events of consequence, and when he began to fall in love he tried to tell women about this, but they did not understand him, for which he revenged himself by speaking to them in a wild, bombastic birdy language and exclusively about the loftiest matters.

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.

1663 Reverend John Eliot publishes the New Testament in the Massachusetts language, with the help of Indian translators and printers. 1775 The U.S. Continental Congress appropriates five hundred dollars to establish Dartmouth College in New Hampshire for the education of Indian children. 1778–1871 The U.S. enters into over 370 treaties with various American Indian nations. More than one hundred include specific provisions for educational facilities.

Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis. (In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.)

Sometimes tears carry the same weight as words.

Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis

Anche le lacrime hanno il peso della parola.

So!' he said, at length, and it came as a complete surprise to me that fellows ever really do say 'So!'. I had always thought it was just a thing you read in books.

Pfui', I said. It is an expression I don't often use...

the march of civilisation has given the modern girl a vocabulary and an ability to use it which her grandmother never had

The world going insane and evil letting slip the birds of war is no excuse for sloppy vocabulary.

No. Seriously. Speak American and not this ancient and very fucked-up, confusing olden-day Euro crap. Without the confusing woo-woo refrences, explain why the hell you're writing Zoey off.

When Lynette described everything that had happened, the puzzle pieces fell into place from my last vision. Goddess, I hate figurative language.

I mean, if you're asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it's absurd to tack a 'sir' on to every sentence. The two things don't go together.

I can't stand Paris. I hate the place. Full of people talking French

Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?' said Wilfred. 'ffinch-ffarrowmere,' corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capitals.

This man's brother I was telling you about, said Spennie, says there's only one rhyme in the English language to 'burglar', and that's 'gurgler'. Unless you count 'pergola', he says——

P.G. Wodehouse

You can't go by what a girl says, when she's giving you the devil for making a chump of yourself. It's like Shakespeare. Sounds well, but doesn't mean anything.

I don't understand a word you say. You're English, aren't you? I admitted it. She didn't say a word. And somehow she did it in a way that made it worse than if she had spoken for hours. Somehow it was brought home to me that she didn't like Englishmen, and that if she had had to meet an Englishman, I was the one she'd have chosen last.