Language Quotes
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Reading has always brought me pure joy. I read to encounter new worlds and new ways of looking at the world. I read to enlarge my horizons, to gain wisdom, to experience beauty, to understand myself better, and for the pure wonderment of it all. I read and marvel over how writers use language in ways I never thought of. I read for company, and for escape. Because I am incurably interested in the lives of other people, both friends and strangers, I read to meet myriad folks and enter their lives- for me, a way of vanquishing the “otherness” we all experience.
Nancy Pearl
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Thoughts there are, not to be translated into any language, and spirits alone can read them.
Arthur Helps
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Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound
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Classic grooming behavior, Dr. Walid told me later, something our fellow primates indulge in to maintain troop cohesion. Dr. Walid said human beings use language for the same purpose—which is why you find yourself talking total bollocks to people you meet at a bus stop and then wonder what the fuck did I do that for?
Ben Aaronovitch
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That's why it's important to be multilingual, because it teaches you so much about your own language.
Sandra Cisneros
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Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.
Stephen Dunn
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We're both Welshmen and growing up, when Howard Marks was finally caught, it was all over the news. He did an interview in the Welsh language, which I also speak, and I was sort of just amazed that this man from a small country was for many years supplying much of the world with most of the marijuana it was smoking. It was incredible.
Rhys Ifans
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The painting cannot be laid aside even for a day; for it takes constant work to keep 'flowing,' but above that it takes concentration, which in our language is consecration.
Morris Graves
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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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for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge
Virginia Woolf
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I recognized my own creative voice filtered through those six strings, but it was also something else entirely. Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me.
Slash
Guns N' Roses
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My view is that knowing languages is part of the process of becoming a cultured person.
Kató Lomb
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Out of the chaos of post-Roman Dark Age Britain, the English had created the world's first nation-state: One king, one country, one church, one currency, one language and a single unified representative national administration. Never again in England would sovereignty descend to the merely regional level. Never again would the idea of England and the unity of England ever be challenged.
David Starkey
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Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.
John Ruskin
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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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In fiction, I have a residual guilt when I focus on story over language or mood or whatever - the more "literary" things. In screenwriting, I don't have that guilt because story is the only thing. Character, dialogue, everything else - they feed into and drive story.
Nick Antosca
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Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.
George Eliot
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There's a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.
Mohsin Hamid