Language Quotes
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You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.
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Anthony Doerr again takes language beyond mortal limits.
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Words should be employed as the means, not as the end: language is the instrument, conviction is the work.
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Every part of you has a secret language. Your hands and your feet say what you have done. Every need brings in what’s needed. Pain bears its cure like a child.
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With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.
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The truth of no truths becomes, inevitably, truth: a way of naming being, language, and culture that guards the boundaries of thought against claims it has not validated.
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Everybody should learn sign language or, at least, 'Hello, do you need help? How are you?'
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Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.
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The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or number, exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
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Two of the hardest words in the language to rhyme are life and love. Of all words!
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The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
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On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
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Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.
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Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.
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Language is present in a piece of work like the sea in a single drop.
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As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
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I used some vivid language that, if I could take it back, I'd take it back. It's not my intention to be personally critical of the President or of anyone else.
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Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.
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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.
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We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.
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The key to integration is a common language and that happens to be German here -- and we can demand that.
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The book is famous for two things: It's an early reader for kids with its simple language. And the second thing is how the fantastic illustrations show dogs doing human things.
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My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.
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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
