Language Quotes
-
Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
-
The wonderful thing about writing for theatre is you can go anywhere you want with the language. There are no limits. With film, they frown on language - it's always 'Too many words.'
Sam Shepard
-
Years ago I went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and did what all tourists there do: wrote some words on a scrap of paper that I tucked into a crevice in the wall. When I closed my eyes and touched my head to the warm stone, it came to me: "All language is prayer." This must be so. Who is it we are speaking to when we speak to anyone? To that person, and also past him or her to Out There. If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, being loved. And reaching out to be heard, met, or loved is a holy act. Language is holy.
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
-
Freedom of expression is not absolute. Countries have laws that define the framework for exercising this right and which, for instance, condemn racist language.
Tariq Ramadan
-
With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.
Kingsley Amis
-
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
-
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola
-
When a monkey nibbles on a weenis, it's funny in any language.
Alan Garner
-
I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.
William Labov
-
The language in New Mexico is very different. At first when you hear the speech here, you don't really know what to do with it, but then I just went with it, because as a writer as well as a translator I do believe that translated words are not different names for the same thing. They're different names for different things. I tried to stay as true as I could, so I used Ruben Cobos' dictionary of Southwestern Spanish, and when I went into Spanish I never assumed the word I would use would be the word a nuevomexicano would use.
Ana Castillo
-
When you lose a spouse, you're a widow or widower; when you lose your parents, you're an orphan. When you lose a child, there's no word in the English language for that position, that place that you're left.
Frances McDormand
-
Any programming language is at its best before it is implemented and used. Anything is possible, anything can happen. On a flimsy ground of reality, imagination spins marvelous patterns.
August Strindberg
-
To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
-
It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
Brian Friel
-
We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.
Willard Van Orman Quine
-
I've got many different voices - I have a Southern girl, an Irish girl. I have a gibberish language that you'd have to decipher. I guess I try to never take myself too seriously.
Rachel Miner
-
Even if language is a living evolving organism, we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive, it can get sick.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
-
I love variety. I love theater. I also love radio. I love language. But, the older you get, you need to earn money. You need to heighten your profile.
Indira Varma
