Language Quotes

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everythi...

I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so...

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of...

The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, m...

I can ask for cigarettes in every language

The species greatest harvest ― words.

Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within ...

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the diale...

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating...

More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, ...

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to eng...

It's only words... unless they're true.

Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just a...

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of lang...

London is a language. I guess all places are.

Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.

On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use. From ...

What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyo...

Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop cler...

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an ...

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's ...

Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and s...

The two most beautiful words in the English language are "cheque enclosed".

The symbolic language of the crucifixion is the death of the old paradigm resurrection is a leap int...

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the ...

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful la...

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, i...

He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place wher...

I wanted to say a certain thing to a certain man, a certain true thing that had crept into my head. ...

The aim of interpretation is not agreement but understanding

They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up ...

One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfam...

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when ...

The most satisfying of languages, Latin.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between differ...

We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitr...

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the Englis...

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselv...

A schoolchild should be taught grammar--for the same reason that a medical student should study anat...

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither o...

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

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French ope...

As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, ...

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what on...

Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would h...

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our co...

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ...

The attitude of independence toward a constructed language which all national speakers must adopt is...

Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, a...

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I...

I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, defor...

But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay th...

There were times, especially when I was traveling for 'Eat, Pray, Love,' when, I swear to God, I wou...

Well... "why" is a hard question to answer in any language.

Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when you're as serious a young man as Giovan...

Then I give her a grim shake of my head and say aloud, 'This blows ass.' She nods sympathetically. S...

He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction, a look of hatred unless he has a most perv...

I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in ...

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' wa...

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Eliza...

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the ve...

He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her...

The form of observation , which underlines all speech and language development, always expresses a p...

The real trouble is this: giving expression to thought by the observable medium of words is like the...

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She w...

Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; yea...

A different language is a different vision of life.

This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells - better yet, he's a clockwork o...

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what...

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. P...

How is it that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. P...

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often gi...

Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. A...

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunde...

It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that it's understood by graduates in law and...

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectiona...

Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ult...

A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above al...

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum ...

Every word is a prejudice.

Language as putative science. - The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in th...

We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its sp...

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical id...

Goal: Clean air, clean clear-running rivers, the presence of Pelican and Osprey and Gray Whale in ou...

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Words are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, al...

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in...

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen whic...

Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make sn...

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the ...

I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown ...