Language Quotes

When words lose their meaning and expression, silence is the only language that heart follows, speaks and celebrates.

~ Akshay Vasu

Why must we be so restricted by language, these ruined tongues! These twenty-six letters- how can that explain this agony? How could we ever endeavor to prove what we are here for- through such combinations? Death is just a word someone invented for what happens at the end of a person’s life. It’s only a word: if there was no word for it we wouldn’t be so worried!

~ Annie Fisher

I like to quote Shakespeare. But in this case, the rapper Eminem said it best: Words are a motherfucker.

~ Jillian Keenan

Words were stories in themselves.

~ Ali Smith

Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person’s emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person’s head by the picture invoking ability of language. Select word pictures might accurately portray what I perceive and still be vague, blatantly inaccurate, completely meaningless, misleading, distorted, or incomprehensible in other persons’ minds.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We are bees then, our honey is language.

~ Robert Bly

Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.

~ Elena Ferrante

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion.

~ Toni Cade Bambara

You see, I’m a juggler with words myself.

~ Anonymous

To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it’s just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn’t because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. Heaven above fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is above? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn’t mean that the mountain is no longer there. It’s there and will be there as long as consciousness exists.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

Don't allow yourself to be fooled by how nice a person appears to be, measure a person's virtuousness by the way in which they treat others with their words and actions .

~ Miya Yamanouchi

I was pretty good at picking up new languages when I was little, but it's not like I had superpowers or anything.Kids just have an easier time with words.

~ Brian K. Vaughan

In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Mr. Treadstone believed that there was always an apposite word. The English language, after all, was the richest in the world. If you couldn’t find the apposite word, if you found your language slipping into the mire of vagueness and obscurity, this meant that you needed to work on your vocabulary. Because the apposite word certainly existed – and it was very eager to make your acquaintance.

~ Gavin Extence

Words are incomplete and yet we need them. They are the cups that give our memories shape, and keep them from trickling away.

~ Carolina De Robertis

An individual who delights at all in the beauty of language does well to avoid becoming an attorney or a legislator.

~ Ron Brackin

My mother's journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth. Without a shadow there is no substance. If we have no shadow, it means we are invisible. As long as I have a shadow, I am alive.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Having all these lies so that you could feel special. It’s time to let go of fantasy and imagined problems. It’s time to embrace the crude and harsh truths.That the existents, the discourses, the frameworks, your words, your meanings, and your definitions, all begin to fade, away, again

~ Camilo Garzon

The room was filled with smoke, dry worn-out smoke retaining in it like a web the insectile cadavers of dry husks of words which had been spoken and should be gone, the breaths exhaled not to be breathed again. But the words went on, and in those brief interruptions between cigarettes the exhalations were rebreathed.

~ William Gaddis

A word drops into the mistlike a child's ball into high grasswhere it remains seductivelyflashing and glinting untilthe gold bursts are revealed to besimply field buttercups.Word/mist, word/mist: thus it was with me.

~ Louise Glück

As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie.

~ Edith Wharton

Without words meaning anything, we stop meaning anything. It's getting to the point where nobody means what they say or says what they really mean.

~ Suzy Kassem

When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world. Tom says that even words as basic as numbers are imbued with layers of meaning. The numbers we use to count plants in the sweetgrass meadow also recall the Creation Story. Én:ska—one. This word invokes the fall of Skywoman from the world above. All alone, én:ska, she fell toward the earth. But she was not alone, for in her womb a second life was growing. Tékeni—there were two. Skywoman gave birth to a daughter, who bore twin sons and so then there were three— áhsen. Every time the Haudenosaunee count to three in their own language, they reaffirm their bond to Creation.

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

The word is always a word for others. Words need to be heard. When we give words to what we are living, these words need to be received and responded to. A speaker needs a listener. A writer needs a reader.When the flesh – the lived human experience – becomes word, communitycan develop. When we say, 'Let me tell you what we saw. Come and listento what we did. Sit down and let me explain to you what happened to us.Wait until you hear whom we met,' we call people together and make ourlives into lives for others. The word brings us together and calls usinto community. When the flesh becomes word, our bodies become part ofa body of people.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter. One word absent from a sentence can drastically change the true intended meaning of the entire sentence. For instance, if the word love is intentionally or accidentally replaced with hate in a sentence, its effect could trigger a war or false dogma.

~ Suzy Kassem

Alphabet soup is my magic eight ball. Served hot or cold, words are delicious.

~ Amanda Mosher

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

~ William Shakespeare

I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the Columbia Indians made their long-houses, or how to make a solar toilet, or how to dry bear meat in the sun. I could tell you all of this if I could talk, but instead the words stayed inside of me and marveled. This I could accept, or so I told myself for a long time. Because the words were there, and they carried me to another place.

~ Rene Denfeld

Some things should never be said. Not out loud in clear, simple words. You talk around them. You leave gaps and blanks. You use other words and talk in curves and arcs for the worst things because you need to keep them like mist. Words are dangerous. Like a spell, if you name the mist, call out all of the words that describe it sharp and clear, you turn it solid, into something that no one should ever hold in their hands. Better that it stays like water, slipping between your fingers.

~ Alexia Casale

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

~ Dean Koontz

Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down.

~ Zhuangzi

The real trouble is this: giving expression to thought by the observable medium of words is like the work of the silkworm. In being made into silk, the material achieves its value. But in the light of day it stiffens; it becomes something alien, no longer malleable. True, we can then more easily and freely recall the same thought, but perhaps we can never experience it again in its original freshness.

~ Erwin Schrödinger

You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.

~ Lily King

Whatever is language is poetic language and if the word required by the poet does not exist in his known language then it is up to him to discover it.

~ Lenore Kandel

There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.

~ Owen Barfield

Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid habits of language out of me so that I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the banalities of the same talk.

~ Pascal Mercier

Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

~ Willard Van Orman Quine

We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them.

~ Samuel Butler

The next time you wish you could find the right words to say to someone who is hurting, just remember that dogs are a man's best friend without ever speaking a word to them. Simply be present and have sympathy.

~ Ashly Lorenzana