Language Quotes
Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.
Language has an ideological agenda that is apt to be hidden from view.
The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.
remember that misuse of language can lead to miscommunication, and that miscommunication leads to everything that has ever happened in the whole of the world
... as Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to 'metal objects designed to cause harm'.
I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow.
Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.
The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.
I want to hear you wound my lovely language with your rough barbarian tongue.
We need a language that brings us together about the deepest things we care about rather than pushing us apart.
A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.
Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point.
For Milady was well aware that her most seductive power was in her voice, which could run skilfully through the whole scale of tones, from mortal speech, upwards to the language of heaven.
The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.
We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.
Words simply mean what people think they mean when they say them.
There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.
God did not give us the gospel to convince humanity
I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly
Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.
So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.
Comment sections on the internet are like gang graffiti, abusive words sprayed like gibberish and it's ugly to look at.
Toxemia. A word that starts so harsh and ends so gently.
To understand Jesus Christ, you must know the Language of Heaven.
As Richard has pointed out on several occasions, I subscribe to the irregular verb theory of life: I am a trained investigator, you have a healthy curiosity, she/he is a nosy parker.
Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details?
That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.
The ancient Hebrews did not write the name of God. I often wish the Christians would follow suit, as never was a word more misused in writing and speaking than the name of the Lord.
They spoke in semaphore, all punctuation unnecessary.“You?”“Great.”They’d trimmed the language to its essentials. Before long it would just be consonants. Then silence.
The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.
Grammarians make no new thoughts, but thoughts make new grammar.
Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don’t believe me? Get with the program, crackpot!
the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
Euphemisms chosen by fear are a covenant with hypocrisy and will immediately destroy the poem and eventually destroy the poet.
Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand.
Like language, I think any who have not acquired spirituality by a certain age are doomed to be never fluent and you are likely to mimic the one that surrounds you.
Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain.
Language has created a barrier that prevents us from seeing existence as it truly is.
Some people use language as a mask. And some want to create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not.
Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity
The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city…