Language Quotes - Page 4

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.

Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of 'Mary Jane' for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember.

Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people and events in great part shaped by the very language in which we describe them? When we try to describe one person to another or to a group, what do we say? Not usually how or what that person ate, rarely what he wore, only occasionally how he managed his job -- no, what we tell is what he said and, if we are good mimics, how he said it. We apparently consider a person's spoken words the true essence of his being.

Freedom, one of the most important words in any language.

The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them. It is true, though, that there are some French words that I have picked up quickly, in fact, words that I cannot remember not knowing. As if I had been born with them in my mouth, as if they were seeds of a sour fruit that someone else ate and then ungraciously stuffed its remains into my mouth.

Adam was charming and spoke perfect French. Like many anglophones in Montréal, he actually spoke French better than we did. They knew exactly which verbs to use in the same way that people knew which utensils to use while eating at a fancy dinner. It was very proper because they learned it from books. They didn’t know slang or how to curse. They didn’t know how to do anything other than be proper and reserved. It was state-sponsored, dry-clean-only French.

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.

I like you; your eyes are full of language."[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

We awaken by asking the right questions.

I like to quote Shakespeare. But in this case, the rapper Eminem said it best: Words are a motherfucker.

In future, brainwave is a media of universal language.

The most satisfying of languages, Latin.

A Blessing on the PoetsPatient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker,Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover,Sharer and saver, muser and acher,You who are open to hide or uncover,Time-keeper and –hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker;May language’s language, the silence that liesUnder each word, move you over and over,Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.

A rumor is usually a lie that the media can legally profit from.

A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton...

Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they're more "open to new experiences" than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self that's bound up in our native language, a "language ego", which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.

And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity

If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the Columbia Indians made their long-houses, or how to make a solar toilet, or how to dry bear meat in the sun. I could tell you all of this if I could talk, but instead the words stayed inside of me and marveled. This I could accept, or so I told myself for a long time. Because the words were there, and they carried me to another place.

Humans have invented all kinds of symbols to communicate not only with other humans but more importantly with ourselves.

Our personal story has many chapters that reconnoiter universal themes. We each struggle to understand ourselves and aspire to make ourselves known to the world. We struggle to win the love of other people. We seek to pick all the low hanging fruit that we come across in our journey through the corridor of time. We write our story in the Niagara of emotional experiences that flowing watercourse makes us human. We use a profusion of words, symbols, and the nuances pulled from a rich library of language to depict the cascade of our visions, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, dreams, and infelicitous thoughts. We use logical and dialectal thought processes when communing with our inner self. We use self-speak along with the esemplastic powers of poetic imagination, sprinkled with the fizz of creativity, to cohere disparate chapters of our life into a unified whole and relay the effervescence of our story to other people.

On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]

...he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke—the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love.

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

Some words are like the old Roman galleys large-scaled and ponderous. They sit low in the water even when their cargo is light.

Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.

The language of the heartIs the only languageThat everybody can understand.

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

We're basking in language itself. The silence of my friend. My love. The one beyond words in her silence. She is always eternally before. When she speaks it is shit, a gift, something to do. In our moment, of waiting, pointing, silent gear, what we went out for—that is pointing. Shit is the award. The award is shit.

Why is English so widespread today, and not Danish?

Alphabet soup is my magic eight ball. Served hot or cold, words are delicious.

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

It's now what enters men's mouths that's evil. It's what comes out of their mouths that is.

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure.

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

If this hast been done to language, I fear to know the fate of all else.

The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands—it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language.

Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head—a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind—and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time.

Isn't one of the first lessons of good elocution that there's nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can't, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing? Or that, in writing, there's nothing you can describe in any page-filling paragraph that can't be captured better in just a sentence or two? Perhaps even nothing in any sentence which cannot better be refined in a single, spot-on word? Does it not follow, then, that there's likely nothing one can say in any word - in saying anything at all - that, ultimately, isn't better left unsaid? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words Helen, hello, help. This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into dipthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie, for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught in surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay.

I know that language will be a crucial instrument, that I can overcome the stigma of my marginality, the weight of presumption against me, only if the reassuringly right sounds come out of my mouth.

The language of light can only be decoded by the heart.

Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated.

When life seems like an uphill task do not ever give up on yourself or on life! Travel to a new place, learn a new language, embrace a new culture, play a musical instrument, read a good book, watch the sunrise, experience the sunset, go for a swim in the river, hug a tree, sit near the lake, or climb a mountain! You will fall in love with life all over again!

Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.

I want you to learn right at the outset not to play with the spoon before you take the medicine. Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. Procrastination is the longest word in the language, but there’s only one letter between its ends when they occupy their proper places in the alphabet.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perception of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking creature with teeth like needles and bulging yellowish eyes that lives in deep waters off the coast of South America. It did not catch on with sophisticated foodies until an enterprising Los Angeles importer renamed it the considerably more palatable "Chilean sea bass.

In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

...it was another year or two before I discovered that drat and draft were different words. During that same period I remember believing that details were dentals and that a bitch was an extremely tall woman. A son of a bitch was apt to be a basketball player. When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank" (27-8).

Furniture or gold can be taken away from you, but knowledge and a new language can easily be taken from one place to the other, and nobody can take them away from you.

In general,' Voss replied, 'it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language.

Death is only a translation of life into another language.

Maybe that was why the French called orgasms “las petites morts”: because the things that bring us passion tend to slip past our defenses, to creep insidiously into every facet of our consciousnesses and kill us as ruthlessly, and efficiently, as any drug.

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.