Language Quotes

For most people, language is our primary interface with each other and with the external world.

~ Erin Kissane

That's just like the manual says,' said Witherwax. If we want to have international brotherhood, we gotta get a language that everybody understands all the time.''You mean with no homonyms?' said Doc Brenner.Mr. Gross belched again, and held up two fingers to indicate another Boilermaker. 'Are you saying that the language a fella speaks can make a fairy of him?' (Gin Comes In Bottles)

~ Fletcher Pratt

Her accent's funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown's. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they're swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they're sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind.

~ Patrick Ness

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain Beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you've spoken or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognise a well-tuned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skilfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, to see it quite naked, in a way.

~ Muriel Barbery

Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.

~ Bill Bryson

Language is a bountiful gift and its usage, an elaboration of community and society, is a sacred work. Language and usage evolve over time: elements change, are reborn or forgotten, and while there are instances where transgression can become the source of an even greater wealth, this does not alter the fact that to become entitled to the liberties of playfulness or enlightened misuse of language, one must first and foremost have sworn one's total allegiance.

~ Muriel Barbery

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction need to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

~ Ben Marcus

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

~ Rae Armantrout

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

~ Sarah Dunant

I always said I'm just an instrument; I'm transparent, like a medium, the language passes through me. Which is a bit like saying I'm a recording device, I start and I go. I had a real connection to ongoing, language production in real time.

~ Constance Dejong

I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me.There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. (Substitutions)

~ Michael Marshall Smith

Simplicity may be simple, but like complexity it requires linguistic precision, and may therefore call for relatively obscure expressions at times.

~ John White

Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent.

~ Ariel Sabar

He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction, a look of hatred unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language of his soul.

~ Emily Brontë

English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.

~ Paul Scott

Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life.

~ Andrew Dalby

There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.

~ H.l. Mencken

You must sit down to speak this language,It is so heavy you can't be polite or chatter in it.For once you have begun a sentence, the whole course of your life is laid out before you-quoted in The Geography of Bliss

~ Bill Holm

It happens all too often - people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.

~ Andrew Dalby

Having words opened up a world of possibilities for Martha.

~ Susan Meddaugh

Words are such fun!

~ Susan Meddaugh

If two thousand five hundred languages are to be lost in the course of the twenty-first century, don’t be in any doubt about what that means for us: in each of those two thousand five hundreds cases a culture will be lost.

~ Andrew Dalby

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.

~ Emma Thompson

Words for completely novel concepts and technical breakthroughs are devised as soon as needed, explained with ease and absorbed with scarcely an effort by all who need them. This ability to innovate in language is crucial to every scientific advance, to our intellectual curiosity, to our originality as human individuals, because it is crucial to our ability to communicate new ideas and discoveries.

~ Andrew Dalby

If you've never studied German before or think you know nothing about it, you might be in for a little surprise. You already know many German words .And you have the advantage of being an English speaker,which means that your knowledge of that language will be a helpful tool for learning German efficiently and comfortably.

~ Edward Swick

Language itself is a major resource in the naming of what cannot be named

~ David Simpson

Languages are not strangers to on another.

~ Walter Benjamin

Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time? - When Our Lips Speak Together

~ Luce Irigaray

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.

~ Jan Morris

There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

~ Jack Lynch

We can only think in a language that we master.

~ José Luis Ruiz

Your language indicates──and limits──what you think.

~ Jonathan Price

This is an odd one. You have one country in the world where a word has a deeper meaning, it can really mess with design plans. ...But we have a difficult situation here so I guess we'll be looking at putting different sound chips in the dolls heading there [Britain].

~ Todd Mcfarlane

When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms.

~ Maria Edgeworth

The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them. It is true, though, that there are some French words that I have picked up quickly, in fact, words that I cannot remember not knowing. As if I had been born with them in my mouth, as if they were seeds of a sour fruit that someone else ate and then ungraciously stuffed its remains into my mouth.

~ Monique Truong

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

~ Walter Kirn

Language is power that gets abused all the time, Robin, but we've got real enemies out there somewhere and until they're out of the picture, I won't get knotted up over people who don't get all the words right. It's a waste of energy.

~ Tim Eldred

In future, brainwave is a media of universal language.

~ Toba Beta

They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn't work. Are is present tense. Dead is -- well, dead is past, isn't it? Present tense modifying past; being modifying non-being. Language, in this instance -- and here Miriam makes a garbled noise in her throat-- fails.

~ Myla Goldberg

Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back.

~ Hakim Bey