Language Quotes
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If you can take photographs with language, I'm taking one right now.
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Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer.
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It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
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The trodden worm curls up. This testifies to its caution. It thus reduces its chances of being trodden upon again. In the language of morality: Humility.
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Language was such a profoundly new evolutionary innovation that our brains had to be completely redesigned in order to handle it.
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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.
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The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.
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America's strength is not our diversity; our strength is our ability to unite people of different backgrounds around common principles. A common language is necessary to reach that goal.
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Like my aunt, alexithymics substitute the language of action for that of emotion. When asked, “How would you feel if you saw a truck coming at you at eighty miles per hour?” most people would say, “I’d be terrified” or “I’d be frozen with fear.” An alexithymic might reply, “How would I feel? I don’t know. . . . I’d get out of the way.”18 They tend to register emotions as physical problems rather than as signals that something deserves their attention. Instead of feeling angry or sad, they experience muscle pain, bowel irregularities, or other symptoms for which no cause can be found. About three quarters of patients with anorexia nervosa, and more than half of all patients with bulimia, are bewildered by their emotional feelings and have great difficulty describing them.19 When researchers showed pictures of angry or distressed faces to people with alexithymia, they could not figure out what those people were feeling.
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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.
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The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
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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.
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Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
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Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.
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The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.
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Language is a virus from outer space.
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I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.
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English is the 'language of liberty' for nations emerging from years of cultural oppression.
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Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes.
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For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.
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If anything, I see myself as a witness. I'd also be pleased, if you'd call me an interpreter. I try to hear and see the message of a place and pass it on, into that other language, the universal one of images.
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Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
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We like to pile language on language. Hunter [ S. Thompson] was an influence on me, no doubt about it.
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Love is the language all animals understand.
