Language Quotes

Before I got into politics, I wanted to be a missionary to people in the Middle East. I thought it would be better to speak with them in their own language.

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

i couldn't speak the language of his feelings

Big-endians and small-endians.

Marian Palaia is a writer of startling grace and sensuous lyricism - reading her, you feel as if you've never heard language this beautiful and this true.

Canada and America are very, very different. It's true that we share a language and many customs. But Americans have a very different view of the world.

As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives .

I don't believe in that country any longer. I'm not interested. I'm writing in the language, and I like the language.

In the commerce of language use only coin of gold and silver.

Laughter is the evidence that we're still here, the proof that our tragedies will not define us forever. Laughter is the language of the survivor.

It's very rare that someone who is so good at the language of numbers, is as good at the language of life. They're two very different worlds.

When you choose a language, you're choosing more than a set of technical trade-offs-you're choosing a community.

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'

After all, nothing helps to write lyrics more than to mess around with the language.

Language to me is a tool a very clumsy tool. And words are garden tools with which to till the soil of one's life.

Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?

It is clear that whatever language of democracy [Barack] Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.

It is clear that whatever language of democracy Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal 'language' but many languages and dialects. There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages.

Yes, etiquette is hypocritical. Yes, it does inhibit children - if you're lucky. But the idea that it's elitist and irrelevant is like saying language is elitist and irrelevant.

I found in investigative journalism it is always best, if you have any language skills, not to admit them.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

It is by metaphor that language grows.

The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.

The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.

I'm pretty good with languages. I know a bit of French and actually want to live in France some day so that I can get fluent. I think it'd be tragic to go through life only knowing one language.

You learn to exploit genre for the more important things - to my mind - like story, character, image, language.

I hope to get my name out there more in the Spanish-language business side of the world.

Kyle had to give her credit; it took skill—plus no heart and a serious abuse of the English language— to break up with someone in fewer than 140 characters.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet

An ear will never do you wrong, but I know writers who... most of the language they use is just extracted language from other languages they've read. I am a big-time reader, but I mix and match.

Sometimes language is not enough.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

I think a lot of guys who are on the internet a lot, they're kind of anesthetized to some of the violent language and all that because they see it all the time.

I'm just being honest about the fact that a second language won't resonate with you like the first does.

Let language be the divining rod that finds the sources of thought.

Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calli-graphically bewigged.

In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.

Numbers are really fascinating things, and they do play a big part in our lives. They are a language of their own.

I read my books out loud to myself because of the demands of the story and demands of language.

For years I lived rather medicated and muted - I did not possess language to describe my vague feelings of unhappiness, to politicize it, to attempt to transcend it.

if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.