Language Quotes
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In short, every adventure of the mind is an adventure vehicled by words. Every adventure of the mind is an adventure with words; every such adventure is an adventure among words; and occasionally an adventure is an adventure of words. It is no exaggeration to say that, in every word of every language — every single word or phrase of every language, however primitive or rudimentary or fragmentarily recorded, and whether living or dead- we discover an enlightening, sometimes a rather frightening, vignette of history; with such a term as water we find that we require a volume rather than a vignette. Sometimes the history concerned may seem to affect only an individual. But, as John Donne remarked in 1624, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ History is not merely individual, it is collective or social; not only national, but international; not simply terrestrial, but universal. History being recorded in words and achieved partly, sometimes predominantly, by words, it follows that he who despises or belittles or does no worse than underestimate, the value and power, the ineluctable necessity of words, despises all history and therefore despises mankind (himself perhaps excluded). He who ignores the enduring power and the history of words ignores that sole part of himself which can, after his death, influence the world outside himself, the sole part that merits a posterity.
Eric Partridge
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There's a certain power in vague language, but I started to get more into the idea of really trying to have a discrete thought in the lyrics and to have songs that were about stuff - to try to make things more coherent.
David Longstreth
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It's nonsense to say that it's not in the bill. The reality is that the bill they will have passed to the Senate will have this language in it.
David Keating
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Unless the chemist learns the language of mathematics, he will become a provincial and the higher branches of chemical work, that require reason as well as skill, will gradually pass out of his hands.
Alexander Crum Brown
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Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
Northrop Frye
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If apple is the language of the future, then art must be the core.
Elliot W. Eisner
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All of us, just because we are able to talk, also believe we are able to talk about language.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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We know the left hemisphere has come online when children start to understand language and learn how to speak.
Bessel van der Kolk
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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
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The sun is perfect and you woke this morning. You have enough language in your mouth to be understood. You have a name, and someone wants to call it. Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it. If we just start there, every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible. If we start there, everything, for a moment, is right in the world.
Warsan Shire
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For me, digital is just another avenue. It doesn't mean that it has to be poor quality or poor content. But, you still run into the same struggles. You can't have full-on language, violence or sexual situations. You can't run rampant with the fact that it's digital. You can't do anything you want. You still have a responsibility to tell a story first, and show what the character is going through first, and then maybe you have a little bit of lee-way to show a more real side of life.
Milo Ventimiglia
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Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
Stephen Sondheim
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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
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Sometimes, you just have to reassure the ones you love in precise language that you'll always be there. Sometimes words are enough.
Cassia Leo
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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
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All language is a popularity contest.
Erin McKean
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Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
George Steiner
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I'm a big believer in rehearsal and a big believer in the actors being able to find the material themselves and identify with the beats themselves without us having to stick to the actual language of the script, just for them to understand what each scene is about.
Dean Israelite
