Language Quotes
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my all-time favorite writers. I feel spiritual when reading his words, even though they're translated. I wish desperately that I could read it in its original language. I already feel like I'm going to church when I read him; imagine if I could read it in the original.
Conor Oberst
Bright Eyes
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You must feel what you're singing, not just have a good presentation of the language.
Cecilia Bartoli
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I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.
William Stafford
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If I as a geologist were called upon to explain briefly our modern ideas of the origin of the earth and the development of life on it to a simple, pas- toral people, such as the tribes to whom the Book of Genesis was addressed, I could hardly do better than follow rather closely much of the language of the first chapter of Genesis.
Wallace Pratt
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How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.
Black Hawk
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Donna E. Smyth - adventures with words; she is always doing something new and unique. Beginning with her visceral morality, her stories are startling, nerve wracking, provocative: she combines Angela Carter's beautiful style with Patricia Highsmith's malevolent atmospheres. Smyth shatters clichs and dismisses mere sociology. She knows that pleasure is besieged by terror. She tells us what we don't want to know, but need to know. Smyth's writing disturbs us, enrichingly, because truth can never be at peace with language.
George Elliott Clarke
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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
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That old adage, that "music is a universal language", is really true. Even if all of the lyrics are understood, they seem to connect with it really well and in some ways, more so.
William Fitzsimmons
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The life these words speak of is not worth the ink they are written in.... He now knows that the only words worth writing down arise when language is impossible.
Andreï Makine
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You hear sounds and orchestration, it's ... the fastest way, I think, to your emotions, even if you don't understand the language of the song.
Sandra Bullock
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What do I think happens when we die? I think we enter into another stage of existence or another state of consciousness that is so extraordinarily different from the reality we have here in the physical world that the language we have is not yet adequate to describe this other state of existence or consciousness. Based on what I have heard from thousands of people, we enter into a realm of joy, light, peace, and love in which we discover that the process of knowledge does not stop when we die. Instead, the process of learning and development goes on for eternity.
Raymond Moody
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Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.
Vincent Van Gogh
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The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.
Jonathan Swift
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We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.
Niels Bohr
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Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Hands have their own language.
Simon Van Booy
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Every form of power comes down to language. In law, there's all kinds of words you don't know if you're not a lawyer and that gives them power. In business, it's the same thing.
Anthony Robbins
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Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.
Joshua Foer
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Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.
Emil Cioran
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When you used to be able to express yourself as an adult in your own language, or as I can do in English, for instance, it's sometimes hard to switch back to very simple talking, like I am forced to do in Finnish. So a real conversation, when I really wanna tell something, I can't do it in Finnish.
Floor Jansen
Nightwish
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Nor do I think that any other nation than this of Wales, nor any other language, whatever may hereafter come to pass, shall on the day of severe examination before the Supreme Judge, answer for this corner of the earth.
Gerald of Wales
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Words fail me sometimes. I have read most every word in the Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language, but I still have trouble making them come when I want them to. Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get – a cold sick feeling deep down inside – when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it. And you know you will never be the same again.
Jennifer Donnelly
