Language Quotes

For many people around the world ethnicity is not a language, it is a religion.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

My tongue was handed down to meby datus and katipuneros. The truth ismy mouth is a battlefield thatyou wouldn’t know how to fight in.

~ Danabelle Gutierrez

Once I have impounded love and towed it into the confine of words, I have lost it altogether.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

kisses... areand always will be the only language that I will have ever truly known.

~ Sanober Khan

Maybe that was why the French called orgasms “las petites morts”: because the things that bring us passion tend to slip past our defenses, to creep insidiously into every facet of our consciousnesses and kill us as ruthlessly, and efficiently, as any drug.

~ Nenia Campbell

Let your feelings flow and the scribbled words stay as a sovereign of the moment.

~ Somya Kedia

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

~ Alan W. Watts

The change of language is a change in reality.

~ Stephen Mitchell

Let each man say what he deems truth, and let truth itself be commended unto God.

~ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

In reality, love is fluid; it’s a verb, not a noun.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t.

~ Lev Grossman

By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and extreme time. Language can no longer describe the world in which we live. With antique ideas and old formulas, we continue to describe a world that is no longer present. In this loss of language, the word gives way to the image as the 'language' of exchange, in which critical thought disappears to a diabolic regime of conformity - the hyper-real, the omnipresent image. Language, real place gives way to numerical code, the real virtual; metaphor to metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one. Mystery disappears, replaced by the illusion of certainty in technological perfection.

~ Godfrey Reggio

difference, distance, absence and seperation lie 'at the heart' of meaning, being and reality

~ Maggie Maclure

Since language produces meaning within an enclosed system, there is always a built-in untranslatability, which national languages began to deliberately pursue. The process added to the creation of an untranslatable reality that can be expresses only in a particular language. It also added to the discovery of untranslatable truths.

~ Minae Mizumura

I know you do not understand what I am trying to tell you; I know you do not understand, because it is the thing that goes deepest into my heart, and there are no words as deep down as that. How can I make you know the reality of it? The world has spattered us all over with words, with cant phrases, with sarcasm, and with fulsome flattery. The world has been so officiously eager to explain for us the thing we mean and the worth of the thing that now, when we try to speak, our meaning is veiled, concealed, smothered, by the hideous volubility of facile expression. How can it have any reality for you when you hear only words about it?

~ Florence Converse

Every language has its own word for the sun, but the sun us always the same.

~ Marty Rubin

Language is a ladder that always falls short of reality.

~ Marty Rubin

As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next.

~ Ibn Warraq

Writing poetry is like having sex with the universe and the language is just a condom.

~ Tripurari

In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Looking at what 'foreplay' is, 'sexual intercourse' is a game.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The joy of knowing a foreign language is inexpressible. I find it really difficult to express such joy in my mother tongue.

~ Munia Khan

As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can't describe how bad you feel, but joy on the other hand is far too divine for human language.

~ Criss Jami

The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become--and such lucidity is a form of joy.

~ Eva Hoffman

From language to no-language is the journey and certainly every master has to use lies to attract you, to make you aware of your mindlessness, your stupidity. That's why I tell you to relish this very moment, and when you squeeze out the juice of every moment, then you will realise that there is nothing worthy in this world, then for the first time you start turning IN-wards, not otherwise!

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn't love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

~ Anonymous

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.

~ John Edgar Wideman

From time to time I try to imagine this world of which he spoke--a culture in whose mythology words might be that precious, in which words were conceived as vessels for communications from the heart; a society in which words are holy, and the challenge of life is based upon the quest for gentle words, holy words, gentle truths, holy truths. I try to imagine for myself a world in which the words one gives one's children are the shell into which they shall grow, so one chooses one's words carefully, like precious gifts, like magnificent gifts, like magnificent inheritances, for they convey an excess of what we have imagined, they bear gifts beyond imagination, they reveal and revisit the wealth of history. How carefully, how slowly, and how lovingly we might step into our expectations of each other in such a world.

~ Patricia J. Williams

The Art of Writing for Children is the knowledge of what is significant to them

~ Suzy Davies

The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.

~ Brion Gysin

It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.

~ Max Barry

I mutter and mutter and no one to listen. I speak my words in Japanese and my daughter will not hear them. The words that come from our ears, our mouths, they collide in the space between us.Obachan, please! I wish you would stop that. Is it too much to ask for some peace and quiet? You do this on purpose, don’t you? Don’t you! I just want some peace. Just stop! Please, just stop.Gomennasai. Waruine, Obachan wa. Solly. Solly.Ha! Keiko, there is method in my madness. I could stand on my head and quote Shakespeare until I had a nosebleed, but to no avail, no one hears my language. So I sit and say the words and will, until the wind or I shall die. Someone, something must stand against this wind and I will. I am.

~ Hiromi Goto

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers -- namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine dramatic showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out -- don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams yay and jumps up and down for joy -- when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.

~ Francine Prose

Language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall.

~ Marilynne Robinson

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

~ Nancy Mairs

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought, experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptual values developed expressly to subordinate women. Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name. No transcendence of the male system is possible as long as men have the power of naming... As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect.

~ Andrea Dworkin

She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. Misanthrope is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men.And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: misogynist. But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

~ Carl Sagan

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

~ Adrienne Rich

Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.

~ Adrienne Rich

There is absolutely nothing feminine about the colour pink, or, anything bad-luck'ish about the colour black — in itself.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana