Language Quotes
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Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
Bessel van der Kolk
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If grammar is medicine, then Roy Clark gives us the spoonful of sugar to help it go down. A wonderful tour through the labyrinth of language.
Anne Hull
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Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
Thomas Carlyle
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The most important word in the language of the working class is "solidarity."
Harry Bridges
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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.
Alexandre Dumas
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You're kidding. I thought all geniuses read Latin. Isn't that the international language for smart people?"-Shane (Glass Houses)
Rachel Caine
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The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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The whole language of nature informs us, that in animated beings there is something above our powers of investigation; something which employs, combines, and arranges the gross elements of matter - a spark of celestial fire, by which life is kindled and preserved, and which, if even the instruments it employs are indestructible in their essence, must itself, of necessity, be immortal.
Humphry Davy
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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.
Raymond Burr
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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.
Wim Wenders
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I get along with all the women singers, but especially Dolly Parton. We talk the same hillbilly language.
Loretta Lynn
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The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema.
Derek Jarman
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He is not to them what he is to me," I thought: "he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine- I am sure he is- I feel akin to him- I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him.
Charlotte Bronte
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I listened to a lot of tapes of British theatre actresses and tried to learn from them. As Americans, we don't have such a gift with language.
Angelina Jolie
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Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.
Russell Baker
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The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.
Russell Baker
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Real emotion transcends language. You dont have to understand their words
to feel their pain.
Julia Roberts
