Language Quotes

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

...to swear with a ferocity that can only be described as a talent.

~ Markus Zusak

The fact that Iam writing to youin Englishalready falsifies what Iwanted to tell you.My subject:how to explain to you that Idon't belong to Englishthough I belong nowhere else

~ Gustavo Perez Firmat

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

~ David Mitchell

If this hast been done to language, I fear to know the fate of all else.

~ Michael J. Sullivan

It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her up till dawn, she’d scripted a whole conversation in Greek for her and Bapi to have as their grand finale of the summer. Now she looked at him contentedly munching on his Rice Krispies, waiting for the right juncture for launchtime.He looked up at her briefly and smiled, and she realized something important. This was how they both liked it. Though most people felt bonded by conversation, Lena and Bapi were two of a kind who didn’t. They bonded by the routine of just eating cereal together.She promptly forgot her script and went back to her cereal.At one point, when she was down to just milk, Bapi reached over and put his hand on hers. ‘You’re my girl,’ he said.And Lena knew she was.

~ Ann Brashares

All translations are made up opined Vikram, Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something

~ G. Willow Wilson

What said those two souls communicating through the language of the eyes, more perfect than that of the lips, the language given to the soul in order that sound may not mar the ecstasy of feeling? In such moments, when the thoughts of two happy beings penetrate into each other’s souls through the eyes, the spoken word is halting, rude, and weak—it is as the harsh, slow roar of the thunder compared with the rapidity of the dazzling lightning flash, expressing feelings already recognized, ideas already understood, and if words are made use of it is only because the heart’s desire, dominating all the being and flooding it with happiness, wills that the whole human organism with all its physical and psychical powers give expression to the song of joy that rolls through the soul. To the questioning glance of love, as it flashes out and then conceals itself, speech has no reply; the smile, the kiss, the sigh answer.

~ José Rizal

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.

~ Stephen Fry

What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.

~ David Sedaris

So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can't help it.

~ Kathy Griffin

When a man is in love how can he use old words? Should a woman desiring her lover lie down with grammarians and linguists? I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love's adjectives into a suitcase and fled from all languages.

~ نزار قباني

With every fragment of rock that fall from me, I can hear the voice of Marianne Engle. I love you. Aishiteru. Ego amo te. Ti amo. Eg elska pig. Ich liebe dich. It is moving across time, coming to me in every language of the world, and it sounds like pure love.

~ Andrew Davidson

Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

~ Siri Hustvedt

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

~ Amy Tan

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)

~ Jodi Picoult

It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.

~ Haruki Murakami

Two languages in one brain? No one can live at that speed!

~ Eddie Izzard

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

~ Robert Bringhurst

Humor is a universal lanuage.

~ Joel Goodman

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

~ Dan Simmons

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

~ Oscar Wilde

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

~ Susan Sontag

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

~ Peter Ellis

A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fanciesthat have moulded them

~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Alice thought to herself, 'Then there's no use in speaking.' The voices didn't join in this time, as she hadn't spoken, but to her great surprise, they all thought in chorus (I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means--for I must confess that I don't), 'Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!

~ Lewis Carroll

Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.

~ Clarice Lispector

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

~ Virginia Woolf

Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.

~ Pádraic Pearse

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

~ Simon Van Booy

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

~ Adam Gopnik

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

~ George Orwell

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

~ Jasper Fforde

Sometimes, language is the sound of longing

~ Simon Van Booy

Now and again he spoke to those that served him and thanked them in their own language. They smiled at him and said laughing: 'Here is a jewel among hobbits!

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time.

~ Stephen Hawking

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

~ Temple Grandin