Language Quotes
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Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.
Terence McKenna
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Art has this long history, predating even language, of expressing nonverbal information.
Betty Edwards
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Be careful. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to the worst Spanish student in the history of the language.” I laughed. “No problemo.
Kiersten White
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I believe that we must use language. If it is used in a feminist perspective, with a feminist sensibility, language will find itself changed in a feminist manner. It will nonetheless be the language. You can't not use this universal instrument; you can't create an artificial language, in my opinion. But naturally, each writer must use it in his/her own way.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.
Haruki Murakami
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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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Church reminded me very much of going to shul. It was a bunch of men wearing long robes, speaking in a language I didn't understand.
Amy-Jill Levine
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No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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Assange is not a 'journalist' any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine 'Inspire' is a 'journalist.' He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.
Sarah Palin
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The language of power was exercised in more than just words. It was presence and thought; it was gesture and timing.
Elizabeth Chadwick
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Language is magic: it makes things appear and disappear.
Nicole Brossard
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One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You cannot evolve faster than your language because the language defines the culture of meaning. So if there's a way to accelerate the evolution of language then this is real consciousness expansion and it's a permanent thing. The great legacies of the 60's are in attitudes and language. It boils down to doing your own thing, feeling the vibe, ego-trip, blowing your mind.
Terence McKenna
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On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.
Heather O'Neill
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It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. ... Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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I've always liked language and been a big reader. I always loved books as objects. My favorite time of year as a child was September when we'd go buy all kinds of notebooks and pens and markers for school. I think I wanted to be a writer just so I'd be able to fill up all those pages.
Elaine Equi
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Seemingly unrelated things that are in fact really related, that's the stuff I like to talk about. Like dancing, language learning, swimming, three-pointers.
Tim Ferriss
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Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has infested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.
Terence McKenna
