Language Quotes
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The Swedish language combines the strong manhood of the German with the delicate beauty of the Italian.
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The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.
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Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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They can’t even think of freedom because they don’t have the language to.
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I've always felt, even as a songwriter, that the rhythm of speech is in itself a language for me.
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I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.
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Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.
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Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.
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To me, a drop of oil paint or a xerographic dot are the same thing – they're all just language.
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I am a better cook than I am an actor. If I have any ego, it's about cooking. I'm one of the best cooks... and I cook in any language.
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Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.
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My last book, 'The Language of Flowers,' I wrote completely on naptime, when my little kids were asleep.
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Astrology is a language. If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you.
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Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
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For me, French is so rich and so sacred that learning it is like learning a foreign language.
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In Italy, it is difficult to see a film in the original language because the voice actors here are a mafia.
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All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.
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I learned Spanish at home and, since half my family doesn't speak English, it's my first language.
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Knowing that language has done so much, we want to believe that it can do everything.
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All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.
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Language is fun; it's fun to try.
