Language Quotes

• 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.

  

  Rabih Alameddine
  • Words
  • Wish
  • Mysterious

• Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

  

  T. S. Eliot
  • Time
  • Help
  • Poetry

• I've always felt, even as a songwriter, that the rhythm of speech is in itself a language for me.

  

  Cyndi Lauper Blue Angel
  • Speech
  • Felt
  • Rhythm

• 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
  • Kind
  • Story
  • Philosophical

• Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet

  

  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
  • Good
  • Architecture
  • Poet

• Memewars is electricity in language, eccentricity at its best where 'there's a profusion of presents.' This book makes eye contact with she and with me. It reminds me how being a reader can be exciting.

  

  Nicole Brossard
  • Book
  • Eye
  • Exciting

• Language is fun; it's fun to try.

  

  Lars Mikkelsen
  • Fun
  • Language
  • Try

• In Italy, it is difficult to see a film in the original language because the voice actors here are a mafia.

  

  Vincent Cassel
  • Language
  • Voice
  • Difficult

• The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.

  

  Antonio Damasio
  • Science
  • Culture
  • Technology

• It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

  

  Stan Getz
  • Music
  • Language
  • Speak

• China's cinema has been rising for some time; it has more exposure, so my chances of becoming internationally known are better. But the first thing I have to do is learn English. If I can grasp the language, then perhaps I can think about the U.S.

  

  Ziyi Zhang
  • Time
  • English
  • Better

• The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

  

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty
  • Remains
  • Expresses
  • Assimilate

• The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning.

  

  Yehuda Amichai
  • Soul
  • Learning
  • Language

• Music is truly love itself, the purest, most ethereal language of the emotions, embodying all their changing colors in every variety of shading and nuance.

  

  Carl Maria von Weber
  • Music
  • Emotion
  • Music Is

• I had to struggle with the language. I can understand Hindi now, but I still can't communicate. And things get lost in translation; I feel rejected all the time.

  

  Nargis Fakhri
  • Time
  • Lost
  • Struggle

• Language rarely lies. It can reveal the insincerity of a writer's claims simply through a grating adjective or an inflated phrase. We come upon a frenzy of words and suspect it hides a paucity of feeling.

  

  Irving Howe
  • Words
  • Feeling
  • Feelings

• It's always a unique challenge when you're working with somebody where English is their second language.

  

  Ethan Hawke
  • Challenge
  • English
  • Language

• When a person has an accent, it means he can speak one more language than you.

  

  Fernando Lamas
  • Person
  • Language
  • Accent

• The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

  

  Yann Martel
  • Different
  • Book
  • Movie

• His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Writer
  • Chaos
  • Lightning

• I thought it was very odd that I had a cross and that I was sticking it in a box saying terrible language. But I have to say that I did not understand.

  

  Linda Blair
  • Language
  • Understand
  • Cross

• Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

  

  Terry Eagleton
  • Book
  • Literature
  • Everyday

• I had two experiences with very close friends of mine who experienced aphasia, the loss of language. It shocked me.

  

  Sam Shepard
  • Friends
  • Language
  • Loss

• I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower.

  

  Sherman Alexie
  • World
  • Men
  • Writing

1

...

20

21

22

23

24

...

75

previous

next