Language Quotes
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I find labels "liberal" and "conservative" of little meaning. Our language has become perverted along with the thoughts of many of us.
Studs Terkel
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Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy
Esther Perel
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And while blood's the only language that your deaf old ears can hear And still you will not answer with that message coming clear Does it mean there's no more ripples in your tired old glory stream And the buzzards own the carcass of your dream?
Harry Chapin
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Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
Huston Smith
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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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It's just nice to be able to communicate and be able to identify with a lot of different cultures. I have no idea what it would be like to be just one thing and speak one language. I feel enormously privileged to travel and be able to mingle and speak to people that, had I only known English, I wouldn't have been able to meet.
Cary Fukunaga
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The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.
Northrop Frye
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Remember that although they may speak a different language, they are still the same kind of people as the folks you know at home, have the same mental processes, are just as kindly and just as friendly. Remember that, quit talking and start over again - in pantomime.
Wally Byam
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Language is a nice way to remember things.
Erin McKean
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To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing - what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.
Gerhard Richter
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It's my language, the language I speak. I've spent a lot more time playing music than talking or writing.
Nitin Sawhney
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But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.
Ben Lerner
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I used language because I wanted to offer content that people - not necessarily art people - could understand.
Jenny Holzer
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At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.
Terence McKenna
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Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care.
Jostein Gaarder
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An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.
Miguel de Unamuno
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There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative.
Ben Lerner
