Language Quotes

Dad says there are more than three thousand letters in the Japanese alphabet, which could pose a problem. There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and I get into enough trouble with them as it is.

~ Rin Chupeco

The stars have their own language, you know. If you're careful, you can learn it.

~ Sarah Jio

The worst kind of oppression is when the victims think and talk in the language of their oppressors.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’? Schadenfreude.

~ John Dolan

Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.

~ Rex Stout

When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others--using it as a way of setting themselves apart and shutting out strangers.

~ Charlotte Lamb

Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.

~ Elizabeth Winder

Every writer dreams of a perfect language. Every writer dreams of a language that obeys, that comes to heel. For some this language is spare and pure, pared down to reveal essential truths without ornament or obfuscation. For others it is devilish and twisting, folding back over itself to create layers of meaning, shades of nuance.A language that will survive through the ages.A language that will crack open the heart of readers like a hazelnut.

~ Helen Marshall

Music is the great unifier. It doesn’t matter which country you’re in or what language is being spoken, the fans just magically seem to get it. They share a common goal of love and celebration for the purity of magnificence and brilliance that has been created by the artist. It’s transcendent. It’s inspiration. It’s raw emotion. It’s communication – a perfect marriage of notes, harmonies, lyrics and melodies. It’s the beauty within the beast.

~ J.m. Nevins

I should think a dead language would be rather boring, sociallyspeaking.

~ Sol Luckman

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

I had a dream about you last night... we tried to joke but neither could make any sense. We realized that puns are present in every language, though not shared by any of them.

~ Marshall Ramsay

Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun - all those exciting verbs that don't come unit the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.

~ Libba Bray

Language, because it is imperfect, cannot encompass experience in its raw and primal condition. To verbalize emotion and action is to decrease their impact.

~ Cirilo F. Bautista

The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.

~ John Sinclair

Sometimes we speak different languages, but our hearts are the same.

~ Mykyta Isagulov

The language of nature is silence.

~ Bryant Mcgill

I'm online, therefore I am.

~ Stewart Lee Beck

The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot.

~ Benny Lewis

English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it. Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person.

~ Cristina Henriquez

If Jupiter was in the ascendant when you were born, you are of a jovial disposition; and if you're not jovial but miserable and saturnine that's a disaster, because a disaster is a dis-astro, or misplaced planet. Disaster is Latin for ill-starred.The fault, as Shakespeare put it, is not in our stars; but the language is.

~ Mark Forsyth

Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and apsirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.

~ Nelson Mandela

Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of 'Mary Jane' for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember.

~ Mark Forsyth

A bar, as any good dictionary will tell you, is a rod of wood or iron that can be used to fasten a gate. From this came the idea of a bar as any let or hindrance that can stop you going where you want to; specifically the bar in a pub or tavern is the bar-rier behind which is stored all the lovely intoxicating liquors that only the bar-man is allowed to lay is hands on without forking out.

~ Mark Forsyth

Spanish—how shall I say this?—is likePortuguese spoken with a speech impediment.

~ Sol Luckman

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.

~ Kate Atkinson

Language has been mobilised and sent into battle; it directs the human carnage of conflict with its enunciation of emotion, stimulating souls to abandon peace.

~ Daniel S. Fletcher

What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don’t have language for. What fascinates me about that is we’re talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It’s almost a paradox that you’re seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn’t have language for it.

~ Stuart Dybek

We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you're an ass.

~ Alena Graedon

You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

English is not merely a language anymore, it has become a way of life for millions of non-native English speakers around the world.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.

~ Mikhail Bakhtin

...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional “victims” who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.

~ Gad Saad

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

~ George Orwell

The Latin word for sausage was botulus, from which English gets two words. One of them is the lovely botuliform, which means sausage-shaped and is a more useful word than you might think. The other word is botulism.Sausages may taste lovely, but it's usually best not to ask what's actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

~ Mark Forsyth

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

~ George Steiner

Bad and cruel as our people were treated by the whites, not one of themwas hurt or molested by our band. (...) The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upontheir rights. They made it appear that they were the injured party, andwe the intruders. They called loudly to the great war chief to protecttheir property.How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make rightlook like wrong, and wrong like right.

~ Black Hawk

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin