Quotes about language

page 5

“Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.”

“You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.”

“Next to ‘God’, ‘love’ is the word most mangled in every language.”

“He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they?”

“They're on their way to the foreign-language wing. That's no surprise. The foreign kids are always here, like they need to breathe air scented with their native language a couple times a day or they'll choke to death on too much American.”

“We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”

“Deep down, you see, I long to be arcane, esoteric. I would love to confound people with their own language.”

“The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness”

“Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language.”

“I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels.”

“I'm swimming in your cadences that you permeate my very language.”

“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.”

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).”

“For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.”

“He even listened to more than her sounds, because Tiger Lily was a girl of few words. He listened with his eyes, watched her facial expressions, judged body language, and therefore read Tiger Lily better than anyone else.”

“Love will heal
What language fails to know”

“Language is the only homeland.”

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. […] Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

“Considering Adrian had once gotten bored while reading while reading a particularly long menu, I had a hard time imagining he'd read the Hugo book in any language.”

“I have no words. Sixteen languages, but no words.
-Vishous”

“Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]”

“All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.”

“I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.”

“It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.”

“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.”

“Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.

Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.

Their language has been lost.

But not the gestures.”

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”

“The aim of language… is to communicate… to impart to others the results one has obtained… As I talk, I reveal the situation… I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.”

“Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.”

“You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”

“If and perhaps…. The language of procrastination and uncertainty. That's just people looking to justify their own lack of action.”

“It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”

“That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.”

“LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.”

“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”

“… when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars”

“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”

“No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand at all, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language, with this 'relation,' precisely, which is yours.”

“The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.”

“And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

“O, with what freshness, what solemnity and beauty, is each new day born; as if to say to insensate man, "Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!" There is no speech nor language where this voice is not heard; but the bold, bad man heard it not. He woke with an oath and a curse. What to him was the gold and purple, the daily miracle of morning!”

“Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are.”

“It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.”

“Sebastian sighed an exaggerated sigh and swung the door shut. Clary stared at Jace. "What the f-"
"Language, Fray." Jace's eyes danced. "Relax.”

“Dreams are the language of God.”

“After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”

“Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbors Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard.”

“The language of solace, and comets, and the girls we all become, in the end.”

“Harry: The most beautiful words in the English language aren't "I love you" but "it's benign."”

“Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.”

“Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.”

“It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.”

“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”

“Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”

“Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.”

“It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.”

“He tried to learn seductive phrases in all languages, but the only Swedish he had ever really needed was, "Do you serve anything aside from pickled fish?" and "If you wrap me in furs, I can pretend to be your little fuzzy bear.”

“Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate toward the practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us.”

“Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?”

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make sense any more.”

“Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush!”

“The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.”

“I 'never told my love' vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears;”

“I can ask for cigarettes in every language”

“Without a constant misuse of language, there cannot be any discovery, any progress.”

“Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart”

“I don't like my language watered down, I don't like my edges rounded off.”

“The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.”

“Never underestimate the value of knowing another's language. It can be far more powerful than swords and arrows.”

“I want it absolutely clear when I stand before the judgement bar of God that I declared to the world, in the most straightforward language I could summon, that the Book of Mormon is true.”

“The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.”

“French is the language that turns dirt into romance.”

“Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?”

“Some people are born with the first word of a language resting on their tongue though it may take some time before they can taste it.”

“I cried in English, I cried in french, I cried in all the languages, because tears are the same all around the world.”

“Love and hate had their own secret languages, and Mark and Kieran were speaking in them now.”

“We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”

“Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language.”

“I’d thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she’d surpassed all the language I had for it.”

“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”

“So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.”

“Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.”

“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”

“But, reader, there is no comfort in the word "farewell," even if you say it in French. "Farewell" is a word that, in any language, is full of sorrow. It is a word that promises absolutely nothing.”

“I like to see an angry Englishman,” said Poirot. “They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.”

“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”

“Two languages in one brain? No one can live at that speed!”

“Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.”

“He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.”

“Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.”

“Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.”

“They fight a war and they don't know what for. Isn't that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different color uniform and speaks a different language?”

“Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”

“It’s in Latin.”
“So? What does it say?”
“I don’t read Latin!”
“You’re kidding. I thought all geniuses read Latin. Isn’t that the international language for smart people?”

“When a man is born… there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

“She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing “yes” in the sky.”

“Language is the dress of thought.”

“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”

“We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.”