Language Quotes

And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity

~ Guy Deutscher

You should really stay true to your own style. When I first started writing, everybody said to me, 'Your style just isn't right because you don't use the really flowery language that romances have.' My romances - compared to what's out there - are very strange, very odd, very different. And I think that's one of the reasons they're selling.

~ Jude Deveraux

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

~ Catharine A. Mackinnon

As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.

~ Nataly Kelly

Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

~ Ben Marcus

Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone.

~ Nataly Kelly

...you do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ...

~ John Geddes

In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.

~ Nataly Kelly

AimlesslyIt pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. NoOne listens to poetry.— from Thing Language

~ Jack Spicer

Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?

~ Nataly Kelly

Of the 193 recognized countries in the world, only politically isolated North Korea is considered monolingual.

~ Nataly Kelly

I fell in love the moment I saw her in her grandfather's kitchen, her dark curls crashing over her Portuguese shoulders. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she smiled.'I'm really not that thirsty.''What? What you say?' Her English wasn't too good. Now I'm seventy-three and she's just turned seventy. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she asked me today, smiling. 'I'm really not that thirsty.''What? What you say?' Neither of us has the gift of language acquisition. After fifty years of marriage we have never really spoken, but we love each other more than words can say.

~ Dan Rhodes

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

To deny access to translation and interpreting services oppresses human rights and violates laws.

~ Nataly Kelly

...language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...

~ John Geddes

Because different cultures see a particular animal as representing a certain human virtue or vice, the use of animal imagery also allows for more colorful commentary on the human condition.

~ Larry Herzberg

There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words Helen, hello, help. This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into dipthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie, for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught in surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay.

~ Tony Burgess

My Japanese isn’t much better today, but at least now I appreciate my duality more than when I was a punk kid.

~ Gil Asakawa

Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary – I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does.

~ Anis Mojgani

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting.

~ Franz Kafka

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

~ John Steinbeck

We feel more than we can express, we see more than we can say.

~ Marty Rubin

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

~ George Orwell

How beautiful to touch another's soul with a word, a gesture, a thought.

~ Marty Rubin

Because you think your language is the best language? That because you were born and your parents babbled to you in this tongue, that it is the best language to speak? How small is your mind.

~ Jeff Wheeler

Loose and forbear!

~ Mark Twain

This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

~ Mark Twain

...it was another year or two before I discovered that drat and draft were different words. During that same period I remember believing that details were dentals and that a bitch was an extremely tall woman. A son of a bitch was apt to be a basketball player. When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank (27-8).

~ Stephen King

Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.

~ William Shakespeare

I phoned the Admiral back.'It's no use, Admiral, the French speak nothing but French.'There was a short pause on the end of the line then his voice rattled into life like a sabre.'They're lying, Tim!''What?''The French Navy must by law speak English, as English is the international maritime language of the sea.''Has anyone told the French that?'The line went dead for a moment before he thundered, 'Yes Nelson. At the battle of Trafalgar.'I tried to stifle an irresistibly British giggle not knowing if the Admiral was making a joke or not. I got it right. He was serious.

~ Tim Fitzhigham

The more clearly we are able to express ourselves, the less room there is for ambiguity. The more elaborate and the more precise our vocabulary, the greater the scope for thought and expression. Language is about subtlety and nuance. It is power and it is potent. We can woo with words and we can wound. Despots fear the words of the articulate opponent. Successful revolutions are achieved with words as much as with weapons.

~ John Humphrys

A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.

~ Bernard Bloch

Going around in life using German, which Margaret had learned only a few years before, was like walking around in high heels--although it drove up the aesthetic rush of going out on the town, it was dreadfully uncomfortable after a while, and there were certain places you couldn't go

~ Ida Hattemer-Higgins

Music is a language - and language, at its finest, should be music.

~ T.l. Rese

Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.

~ Roland Barthes

The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it.

~ Jonathan Culver

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.

~ Roland Barthes

Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -> “I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . .

~ Roland Barthes

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

~ Dexter Palmer

Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.

~ James Joyce