Language Quotes
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We live in a world filled with language. Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human community. Writers are either polluters or part of the clean-up team. Just as the language of power and greed has the potential to destroy us, the language of reason and empathy has the power to save us. Writers can inspire a kinder, fairer, more beautiful world, or invite selfishness, stereotyping, and violence. Writers can unite people or divide them.
Mary Pipher
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Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things: fairy tales, dead languages, weird folk beliefs, fascinating religions, and more.
Laini Taylor
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I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.
Rachel Kushner
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Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
Martin Heidegger
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You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.
Lily King
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We are living in a society that is totally dependent on science and high technology, and yet most of us are effectively alienated and excluded from its workings, from the values of science, the methods of science, and the language of science. A good place to start would be for as many of us as possible to begin to understand the decision-making and the basis for those decisions, and to act independently and not be manipulated into thinking one thing or another, but to learn how to think. That's what science does.
Ann Druyan
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Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.
Claude Levi-Strauss
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I love poetry. It's at the heart of everything I do. Poetry transforms what we call language, and uses language as the stuff to become something else. I get spun around by what happens in words. When that occurs, it inspires images that seem so original to me as an artist, even though I'm following what the poem has offered.
Ashley Bryan
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No language is as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem'd polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.
Benjamin Martin
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I was born in Brooklyn and raised in Pittsburgh. I've never been to Iran, I don't speak the language, and, probably most important of all, my Iranian father left home when I was nine months old. That's the extent of my connection to Iran.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
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Music is international for me so it doesn’t matter the language.
Johnny Hallyday
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I am most familiar with the Gujarati language.
Narendra Modi
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Intrinsic to the concept of a translator's fidelity to the effect and impact of the original is making the second version of the work as close to the first writer's intention as possible. A good translator's devotion to that goal is unwavering. But what never should be forgotten or overlooked is the obvious fact that what we read in a translation is the translator's writing. The inspiration is the original work, certainly, and thoughtful literary translators approach that work with great deference and respect, but the execution of the book in another language is the task of the translator, and that work should be judged and evaluated on its own terms. Still, most reviewers do not acknowledge the fact of translation except in the most perfunctory way, and a significant majority seem incapable of shedding light on the value of the translation or on how it reflects or illuminates the original.
Edith Grossman
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I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor.
Danielle Trussoni
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English is the easiest language to speak badly.
George Bernard Shaw
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As long as you are successful and winning matches, the language is no problem at all. But when the results are insufficient, the difficulties begin. At this time, a coach needs to go into more detail with his instructions, and that's where the problems can lie.
Ottmar Hitzfeld