Language Quotes
Church reminded me very much of going to shul. It was a bunch of men wearing long robes, speaking in a language I didn't understand.
Amy-Jill Levine
Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.
John Ruskin
Every film had its own grammar. And it's your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story.
Darren Aronofsky
I never found accents difficult, after learning languages.
Vivien Leigh
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
George Steiner
No doubt you are as alarmed as I by the tragic decline in America's language skills. If 10 people read the following sentence: Two tanker trucks has just overturned in Alaska, spilling a totel of 10,000 gallons of beer onto a highway. two would find an error in subject-verb agreement, two would find an error in spelling, and six would find a sponge and drive north.
Mike Nichols
The mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'W-A-T-E-R' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free.
Helen Keller
The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media.
Ben Lerner
Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.
Louise Erdrich
Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.
Thomas Nagel
Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it.
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet
I'm interested in the way that the language of labor has been suppressed in our culture, the way it has disappeared from our vocabulary and is never heard on stage. . . . I'm better at writing than I am at organizing [political action]. SLAUGHTER CITY is my small contribution. If it gives people a voice it is worth something. So often we forget what we are no longer hearing.
Naomi Wallace
Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperience terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past.
Bessel van der Kolk
I want to tell A Story, Every Story, everything all at once, not anything in particular that might be said through the words I know, and I try to roll all sounds into one, to accumulate more and more syllables, as if they might make a Möbius strip of language in which everything, everything is contained. There is a hidden rule even in this game, though - that the sounds have to resemble real syllables, that they can't disintegrate into brute noise, for then I wouldn't be talking at all. I want articulation - but articulation that says the whole world at once.
Eva Hoffman
For me, therapy is partly translation therapy, the talking cure a second-language cure. My going to a shrink is, among other things, a rite of initiation: initiation into the language of the subculture within which I happen to live, into a way of explaining myself to myself. But gradually, it becomes a project of translating backward.
The way to jump over my Great Divine is to crawl backward over it in English. It's only when I retell my whole story, back to the beginning, and from the beginning onward, in one language, that I can reconcile the voices within me with each other; it is only then that the person who judges the voices and tells the stories begins to emerge.
Eva Hoffman
When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth.
William H. Hunt
