Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.

A civil tongue speaks the language of masters. An uncivil tongue reveals character flaws of its master.

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

Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?

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”)

The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.

Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that poets, or writers, or whoever it was that was in charge of devising new words, could keep...

You have to watch your language. People will think you have no fucking class

There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the water against the swimmer’s chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of...

A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same dog he was before? No sir; he is das Hundes; put him in the Dative case & what is he?...

A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century ‘reality’, surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth. In approaching literature, it has aimed at restoring to the word its magical qualities. And at giving back to language...

Have you heard,” he said “that many of our people believe if you know five colloquial expressions in their tribal language, they must always provide you with nourishment and shelter? But-” He paused as though to make sure she was paying attention. “But if you know fewer than five, they owe you not even a...

A good story or a book is all about it’s power to hold it’s readers still till the very last word of it’s climax – complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!

Being a poet one confronts the limitation of language, how can the spirit be revealed under any restrictions.

Faeces by any other name would smell as gross

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: “introit,” “offertory,” “liturgy,” “movable feast,” “the minor elevation,” “the lavabo,” “the apparition of Lourdes,” and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics...

A body is a body, but only voices are capable of love

Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we’ll never meet.It’s the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:The history of how you felt.

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?

He usually says either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and people think that’s because of the language barrier. I think that’s all he has to say. He’s as calm as anybody I’ve ever met.

Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute. The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

modest changes in the Java language to support scientific computing

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There’s the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind.

DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work.

The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senslesse and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst...

If you use the term ‘over-exaggerate,’ you know the definition neither of ‘exaggerate’ nor of ‘over.

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God,...

A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

He called it potentia because there’s nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you’re making it up as you go along.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Language also acts like love in form.

I can’t write anymore. My words are paper airplanes tenuously gliding towards the dust. The wonder of the Phoenicians, which throughout the latter part of this entry I have not fully comprehended, is getting vaguer still. Where did this feather in my hand come from? Am I Icarus?

Before you judge me as some kind of ‘anything goes’ language heathen, let me just say that I’m not against usage standards. I don’t violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don’t wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful...

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

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

Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?

Man acts as though he were the sharper and the master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Music is exciting and easy to enjoy, the rhythm and voice.It does not need interpretation. That is why it is called the Universal Language.

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...

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: “Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.”...

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

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

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.

I should learn the language of a politician – give away as little and keep the rest to yourself. Not lie, I just want to be more guarded.

There is one thing I like about the Poles—their language. Polish, when it is spoken by intelligent people, puts me in ecstasy. The sound of the language evokes strange images in which there is always a greensward of fine spiked grass in which hornets and snakes play a great part. I remember days long back...

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

I picked up a new language a few months ago. It was just laying on the ground, dirty, so I scooped it up and popped it in my mouth.

It’s only words… unless they’re true.