Language Quotes
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Throughout our lives friends enclose us like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries; crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses and parts of them always remain. Friendship asks the truth and wants the truth, hollows and fills, ages with us, and we through it. It cradles us like family. It is ecology and mystery and language - all three. Our grown-up friendships - especially the really meaningful ones- model for our children what we want them to have throughout their lives.
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The habits and language of clandestinity can intoxicate even its own practitioners.
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You've got a new Spanish-language album out now ["90 Millas," released in September of 2007], and the single ["No Llores"] is #1 on the Billboard Latin chart.
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In my father's language: "To create something out of nothing." That possibility exists in India even in old-world sectors like agriculture.
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...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional "victims" who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.
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All of the 29 Marines that I went in [with], we got together and made a code in our own language. There were over 400 or 500 words that we made up at that time. We memorized them and everything was up here.
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Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.
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If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
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Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
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Urdu can not die out because it has very strong roots in Persia. The language itself is not only just the language of the Muslims, but it's also the language of the Hindus.
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The older you get, the more power you have with language as a writer, which means that you have to be extra responsible for what you say, whether it's in print or in front of a microphone, because those words can go out and kill or go out and plant seeds for peace.
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Day and night Balian studied Arabic, both the language of the street corner and the more formal prose of his oneiric teachers. It was not that he mastered the language but rather that it mastered him. He found himself thinking in a language in which nouns shaded imperceptibly into verbs, a language which seemed to discount being in the present, a language with a special verb form for colours and physical deformities, a language of rhythmic syntax and many tiered layers of sense, communicated through hawking stops, gutturals, odd emphases and doublings.
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Even if you're a genius and you invent your own language, it doesn't become a language until there are people using it.
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The adjective is the enemy of the noun and the adverb the enemy of damn near everything else. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language.
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Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.
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A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.
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Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.
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Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.
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Cooking was my lingua franca, my love language.
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We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.
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I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.
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Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise - that which is common to you, me, and everybody.
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The more you speak more languages, the more you understand about yourself. It's like being blind. You aren't less of a person, but you're missing out on wonderful things.
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Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.
