Quotes About Language

And I realize there's another group of words that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we're gone, they'll lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and anyone of them'll take your hand off.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers

I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.

Home is a damaged word, bruisable as fruit, in the cruel glossaries of the language I choose to describe the long, fearful march of my childhood. Home was a word that caught in my throat, stung like a paper cut, drew blood in its passover of my life, and hurt me in all the soft places. My longing for home was as powerful as fire in my bloodstream.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.

When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other.

Among the peoples of the world I am not universally admired for the bell-like clarity of my diction. Words slide out of my mouth like fat fish. Having lived my life in various parts of Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas and having been sired by a gruff-talking Marine from Chicago and a grits-and-gravy honey from Rome, Georgia, what has remained is an indefinable nonspeech, flavored subtly with a nonaccent, and decipherable to no one, black or white, on the American continent.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what 'tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. It is admired only if it's done in silence.

an untranslatable potpourri of grunts and monosyllables, punctuated only by Prophet's beautifully effusive smiles.

The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. Sorrow is admired only if it's done in silence.

Here in Raine, I can walk with the sunlight on my face. I can speak to anyone who speaks to me. I can learn my daughter's language. I can be called the name I was given when I was born. Here I am no longer my own secret. Will you let me stay?

A net of words, he said at last, is more powerful than a net of rope.

He exuded ambiguities she decided, that was his fascination. His mouth spoke; his eyes said something other: his smile belied everything.... He played with the language of the Circle of Days like a child with an arsenal of twigs.... His music said otherwise it seemed to echo through time out of a past as old as the stones on the hill. He lied with every note he played. Or in his music he finally told the truth.