Language Quotes
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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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A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
Anne Carson
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I was reading The Bible a lot through my 20s, mostly the Old Testament, just because I was knocked out by the language and the stories. I felt that the God being talked about there, who was this insane, vindictive patriarch - it was kind of thrilling, and titillated something in me at the time.
Nick Cave
The Birthday Party
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I have for a long time felt that our society is becoming more and more fractured and divisive and that you could go a whole day without really talking to another person. If you give people a good book to talk about, you can build a community out of a diverse group. A common language grows out of it.
Nancy Pearl
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If anyone has the opportunity to work with that woman, jump at it. She is the most generous, most giving director I have ever worked with in my entire life. She is classy. She speaks a dozen difference languages.
Tituss Burgess
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You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.
Ethan Canin
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To write about history or language is supposed to be within the reach of every man. To write about natural science is allowed to be within the reach only of those who have mastered the subjects on which they write.
Edward Augustus Freeman
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If names are not correct, then language is not in accord with the truth of things. If language is not in accord with the truth of things, then affairs cannot be carried out successfully.
Confucius
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Music is the most spiritual language for the human being.
Celedonio Romero
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In the Sapient tongue he said softly, ‘Tell me, Master, did you know Incarceron was tiny?’ ‘Is it?’ Sapphique replied in the same language, his green eyes as he looked up lit by deep points of flame. ‘To you, perhaps. Not to its Prisoners. Every prison is a universe for its inmates. And think, Jared Sapiens. Might not the Realm also be tiny, swinging from the watchchain of some being in a world even vaster?
Catherine Fisher
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Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.
Joshua Foer
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Many of us have to spell words such as "out," "cookie," and "bath" when conversing with other people, lest we unnecessarily excite our pets. And even then they often understand. I've actually had clients who resorted to using a second language around their dogs, but after a while their perceptive pooches caught on. Who says dogs don't understand us?
Warren Eckstein
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When I ask candidates to tell me about their weaknesses, I am hoping for a wise, honest, and self-confident answer. When I hear a candidate rationally admit a weakness, I am impressed. When I hear a candidate duck the question with language straight out of a book, I start thinking about the next candidate.
Eric Sink
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If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering . . . then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?
Carole Maso
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Unencountered Language is the court and spark between words we recognize and those we don't.
Andrew Lakey
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The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.
Ammianus Marcellinus
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I know how to say 'no' in twelve languages. That's enough for a woman.
Sofia Villani Scicolone
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Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.
Claude Levi-Strauss
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We started the band with a work ethic of 'it's us against the world' and that is something that our fans aligned with, too. Together, we speak a common language. I think that motto has helped us keep the creative force alive all these years while the fans have kept the fire burning for us to always be excited to create new music for them. Without the fans, we are a band without a home.
David Ellefson
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She’d been in America almost three years now, but she still wasn’t used to it, the same language sure, but they had different words for everything; she’d learned that a scone was a biscuit, that sidewalk meant a pavement, and that autumn was fall.
Colin Falconer
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The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.
Albert Einstein
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Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
Terry Eagleton
