Language Quotes

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.

~ Billy Collins

To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

~ Rebecca Solnit

How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.

~ Rebecca Solnit

The trouble with today's snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs, is that they don't go far enough; they don't have a coherent view of life. Spinning around in the media from moment to moment, they don't stand for anything, push for anything; they're mere opportunists without dedication, and they don't win any victories.

~ David Denby

The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, most of their consonants were washed overboard in a storm, and they arrived here with almost nothing but vowels. All the streets have names like Kal'ia'iou'amaa'aaa'eiou, and many street signs spontaneously generate new syllables during the night.

~ Dave Barry

People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.

~ John Mcwhorter

I will treat language with resigned delight, embrace it like unrequited love, offer words to you with a kind of secret shame, for I know that sometimes there is such a thing as too much language, and that language can hold a kind of sincerity that is tiresome and overwrought.

~ Meia Geddes

Language, as much as land, is a place. To be cut off from it is to be, in a sense, homeless.

~ Lauren Collins

A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.

~ John Berger

Uh, she said maybe your eyes matched the Fog like a synchronous magnetic field?” “I don’t even know what language that is.

~ Joel N. Ross

By sabotaging logic, the common frame of reference, and the common language, we have removed a safety valve that allows cultural divides to be resolved.

~ Mike Klepper

before men could speak they enjoyed confounding another with signsthey enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an imageas much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave

~ Frank Stanford

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.

~ Donna Tartt

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.

~ John Berger

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal

~ John Berger

One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.

~ Donna Tartt

I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way, regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all.

~ Claire-Louise Bennett

Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence.

~ Carl Sagan

An accurate accent is powerful because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy. It connects you to another person's culture in a way that words never can, because you have bent your body as well as your mind to match that person's culture. Anyone can learn bawn-JURE in a few seconds. To learn how bonjour fits your companion's mouth and tongue; to learn how to manipulate the muscles, the folds, and even the texture of your throat and lips to match your companion's -- this is an unmistakable, undeniable, and irresistable gesture of care.

~ Gabriel Wyner

I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language in only a few generations if all the chimps unable to communicate were to die or fail to reproduce. Basic English corresponds to about 1,000 words. Chimpanzees are already accomplished in vocabularies exceeding 10 percent of that number.

~ Carl Sagan

I know that language will be a crucial instrument, that I can overcome the stigma of my marginality, the weight of presumption against me, only if the reassuringly right sounds come out of my mouth.

~ Eva Hoffman

Human spoken language seems to beadventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities.

~ Carl Sagan

a hymn then not to birds but to words which themselves feel like feather and wing and light, as if it were on the delicacy of such sweet syllables that flocks take flight.

~ Kei Miller

Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.

~ Amitav Ghosh

It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.

~ Andrew Solomon

They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there. Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things

~ Yuri Herrera

How much have we not seen or felt or heard because there was no word for it -- at least no word we knew? We speak to navigate ourselves away from dark corners and we become, each one of us, cartographers.

~ Kei Miller

So many people understand language, but few people understand the real meaning of language. They that understand the meaning of language understand language and life better!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Language is where the tongue fails itself over & over again.

~ Christopher Soto

Language lives in the mind, moves around with the tongue and gets its meaning in action!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

There's a world of difference between, Look at this mess you made! and I don't like to see food on the floor!

~ Joanna Faber

Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.

~ Steven Pinker

Our children's won't learn Kurdish Language fluently if we don't tech them.

~ Davan Yahya Khalil

If you'd combat bigotry, use honest language and call things out for what they really are.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.

~ David Crystal

I was born with my voice in my hands.

~ Kathryn Lomer

We live at the level of our language.

~ Ellen Gilchrist

As you may follow, they are an extremely hostile species (i.e. there is no word for ‘welcome’ in the Ruminarii language.) In four short centuries they had managed to lay waste to almost a thousand star systems, enslaving their populations and stripping them of all they wanted.

~ Christina Engela

The most satisfying of languages, Latin.

~ Donna Tartt

Her face looked for the answer that is always concealed in language.

~ John Steinbeck