Language Quotes
-
I owe my own fluency with language to Brooklyn. Everyone talked about everything, from the Dodgers to the revolution.
David Meltzer
-
One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures.
Galileo Galilei
-
When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.
Elena Ferrante
-
Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
-
I stand and listen to people speaking french in the stores and in the street. It's such a pert, crisp language, elegant as ruffling taffeta.
Belva Plain
-
The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.
Edwin Muir
-
Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language.
William Shawn
-
Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.
Tommy Lee Jones
-
He directed her attention to another question: "When I speak to you in your language, what happens to mine? Does my language continue to speak, but in silence?
Abdelkebir Khatibi
-
I see tendencies, I see body language.
Michael Chang
-
When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language - or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up.
Allen Lacy
-
I tell people all the time, I've always loved music and I love the language, which is a huge reason why I'm part of theater. But, I didn't wanna do all of this. I would've been satisfied to do it, like, on the weekends among friends, and to have a regular job.
Yasiin Bey
Black Star
-
We understand … that what constitutes the dignity of a craft is that it creates a fellowship, that it binds men together and fashions for them a common language.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
-
If language is not rectified, words do not correspond to meaning, and if words do not correspond to meaning, our deeds cannot be accomplished.
Confucius
-
What makes international cinema so interesting is that each territory has its own sensibility. When you look at an Indian or French film, there's a certain flavor. And even though the language is different, if the film is successful, it has something very common and understandable.
Wong Kar-wai
-
Obama sees the world in two ways: from the black perspective and from the white perspective. He was raised as a black man, whose culture he has self-consciously adopted. But he was reared largely by his white grandparents. He lived a kind of racially bipartisan experience, and he will be able to speak a language that resonates with both communities.
Michael Eric Dyson
-
Curses are exacting, legal arrangements of the spiritual world. Just like human contracts contain fine print and legally crafted language, satanic curses are filled with minutiae that required detailed voiding.
Bob Larson
-
The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word 'renowned'... I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative... Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International.
Geoffrey K. Pullum
