Language Quotes

Language does have the power to change reality. Therefore, treat your words as the mighty instruments they are - to heal, to bring into being, to remove, as if by magic, the terrible violations of childhood, to nurture, to cherish, to bless, to forgive - to create from the whole cloth of your soul, true love.

~ Daphne Rose Kingma

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets —no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

~ Philip Roth

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

~ Marguerite Duras

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.

~ David Sedaris

Just remember, when someone has an accent, it means that he knows one more language than you do.

~ Sidney Sheldon

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.

~ Confucius

Translation is the art of failure.

~ Umberto Eco

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

~ Seamus Heaney

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.

~ John Dewey

A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.

~ Ari Marmell

The term political correctness has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's Thought Police and fascist regimes.

~ Helmut Newton

The thing he said aloud did not succeed.

~ Tony Burgess

There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.

~ Victor Pelevin

Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.(The Man Whom The Trees Loved)

~ Algernon Blackwood

Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else.

~ Derek Landy

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

~ Samuel Johnson

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellowmen bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

~ Richard Mitchell

Words can be medicines; they can also be poisons. Words can heal; they can also kill... It all depends on how, when and where they are use and against whom! Let us not abuse our words. It's a misuse of the tongue!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

~ Dan Simmons

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind.

~ Teresa Jordan

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

~ Siri Hustvedt

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

~ Richard Mitchell

She said the words, and then she had a strange moment of seeing them, hanging there over her head. You're going to vacuum up that squi

~ Kate Dicamillo

Language is insight itself.

~ Confucius

The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as snakes or roaches. This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that fellow humans were created in God's image.

~ Immaculée Ilibagiza

The species greatest harvest ― words.

~ David Brin

His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.

~ Richard Mitchell

Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young.

~ David Brin

The Actor, noticing a closed bookshop, dismounted from the horse which he tied to a street lamp. He woke up the bookseller and bought a Spanish grammar and dictionary. He set out again across town marveling at the way that the words of the foreign language were freshly gathered fruits and not old and dry. They touched the senses marvelously, new like young beggars who accost you, not yet words but the every things they designate, happily running naked before being clothed again in abstraction.

~ Georges Limbour

By claiming that our words are too hard to understand, the media perpetuates the idea that WE are too hard to understand, and suggests that there’s no point in trying.

~ C. N. Lester

One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt this before.

~ M.l. Rio

When there's a negative word or expression-immaculate, for example-but the positive is almost never used, and you choose to use it, you become rather amusing. Or pretentious. Or pretentiously amusing, which can sometimes be good. In any case, you are uncovering a buried word.

~ E. Lockhart

When I asked if she read poetry anymore, she said no. she had lost her taste for it. That was how she said it, lost her taste. I asked how that could happen, and she said she agreed with Plato, or at least Plato as summarized for her: that there was something dishonest about it and that he was right to want to banish the poets. What she mean't, she told me, was that the only reality was life, real life, and that these beautiful versions were lies and she no longer had patience for it.

~ Daphne Kalotay

It is time to put down the pen; time to clear the throat. Speaking is a different thing altogether from writing. The spoken word has different properties, and different powers. If I have learned anything from writing down my own tale, it is this.

~ Dexter Palmer

The only substance that goes in and never leaves, are words

~ Natasha Tsakos

TO VICTOR HUGO OF MY CROW PLUTO “Even when the bird is walking we know that it has wings.”—VICTOR HUGO Of: my crow Pluto, the true Plato, azzurronegro green-blue rainbow— Victor Hugo, it is true we know that the crow “has wings,” however pigeon-toe- inturned on grass. We do. (adagio) Vivorosso “corvo,” although con dizionario io parlo Italiano— this pseudo Esperanto which, savio ucello you speak too— my vow and motto (botto e totto) io giuro è questo credo: lucro è peso morto. And so dear crow— gioièllo mio— I have to let you go; a bel bosco generoso, tuttuto vagabondo, serafino uvaceo Sunto, oltremarino verecondo Plato, a

~ Marianne Moore

TO A GIRAFFE If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal to be personal and undesirable to be literal—detrimental as well if the eye is not innocent-does it mean that one can live only on top leaves that are small reachable only by a beast that is tall?— of which the giraffe is the best example— the unconversational animal. When plagued by the psychological, a creature can be unbearable that could have been irresistible; or to be exact, exceptional since less conversational than some emotionally-tied-in-knots animal. After all consolations of the metaphysical can be profound. In Homer, existence is flawed; transcendence, conditional; “the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual.

~ Marianne Moore

ROSEMARY Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary— Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly— born of the sea supposedly, at Christmas each, in company, braids a garland of festivity. Not always rosemary— since the flight to Egypt, blooming differently. With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath, its flowers—white originally— turned blue. The herb of memory, imitating the blue robe of Mary, is not too legendary to flower both as symbol and as pungency. Springing from stones beside the sea, the height of Christ when thirty-three— it feeds on dew and to the bee “hath a dumb language”; is in reality a kind of Christmas-tree.

~ Marianne Moore

In the days of Prismatic Colornot in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the refinement of early civilization art, but because of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band of incandescence that was color keep its stripe

~ Marianne Moore

But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

~ Madeleine L'engle