Language Quotes
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That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
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I think that when you're writing plays, and I think it's also true with novels, it helps to have an ear for the music of language, for what we call poetry, for the sound effects and the way that the sound can produce sensual feeling at odds with or consonant with the content of the work. Your work is also gorgeous writing. It's very unfortunate when you open a novel that everybody's loving and it's just, you know, an excruciatingly bad sentence.
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A lot of times, we look at jazz in eras. How can we not keep those eras separate and think of the language as one complete continuum? It's all interrelated, and it's all evolutionary.
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I think with all my books, language has been their subject as much as anything else. Language can elide or displace or sideline whole groups of people. You can't necessarily change the way language is used, but if it becomes something you're conscious of... that gives you a certain power over it.
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Dancing doesn't have a language.
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Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.
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Our German language has a word which in a magnificent way denotes conduct based on this spirit: doing one's duty [Pflichterfüllung]-which means serving the community instead of contenting oneself. We have a word for the basic disposition which underlies conduct of this kind in contrast to egoism and selfishness-idealism. By 'idealism' we mean only the ability of the individual to sacrifice himself for the whole, for his fellow men.
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Language does not make one an elite.
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We do not create marriage from scratch. Instead, in the elegant language of the marriage ceremony, we 'enter into the holy estate of matrimony.'
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Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.
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There's a melody in everything. And once you find the melody, then you connect immediately with the heart. Because sometimes English or Spanish, Swahili or any language gets in the way. But nothing penetrates the heart faster than the melody.
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Math is my favorite subject. It's the universal language. I like the fact that wherever you go in the whole world, two plus two will still be four.
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Basketball, in America, is like a culture. It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here.
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The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
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I have a handicap in that English is not my first language. So even though I'm a writer, I don't write anymore because it's just harder in English.
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I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love.
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Heart is sea, language is shore. Whatever sea includes, will hit the shore.
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With Lille, we could have gone to the South of France, and people wouldn't have recognised us. But at Chelsea, the players are at another level. Everything has changed – the language, the country – but it is up to me to adapt.
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He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.
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The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.
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Language is the tool of the tools.
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I think you can really tell a good actor if you can put a camera on them and they can just talk and emote and react and you don't have to keep cutting away from them, because they are the language and the behavior. It's all a tour-de-force performance.
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Despite overwhelming support for the United States to adopt English as its official language, we have still not taken that important step.
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I think cinema has this beautiful component. It's a universal language.
