Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all...

The word begone is a Russian doll. A small, single word, which contains so many others; and when all the smaller words inside line up, they look like a bridge: Be Beg Ego Go On...

The word very will vary in muchiness. I love you very much, and that won’t vary from day to day.

I’m bilingual, speaking English and body language. I prefer the latter, because I can speak it silently and without listening and while my back is turned.

We have nothing in common.” Comfortable silence proves just how much we do.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

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...

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

We all know that there are language forms that are considered impolite and out of order, no matter what truths these languages might be carrying. If you talk with a harsh, urbanized accent and you...

When the meaning is unclear there is no meaning.

Language has not the power to speak what love inditesThe soul lies buried in the Ink that writes

For one must label a thought with language for one can understand the meaning of the thinking mind.

Comment sections on the internet are like gang graffiti, abusive words sprayed like gibberish and it’s ugly to look at.

She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man’s skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he’d never studied. Maybe it would be like...

Geometry is the language of time.

Progressives’ don’t just redefine (and valorize) deviancy; they insist on renaming it, too.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty...

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

(Rigg) had often complained that all these languages were useless, and Father had only said, “A man who speaks but one language understands none.

las petites morts”: because the things that bring us passion tend to slip past our defenses, to creep insidiously into every facet of our consciousnesses and kill us as ruthlessly, and efficiently, as any drug.

Modern nationalism swept Europe alongside the flourishing of industrialisation. Across the continent, poets and intellectuals cultivated and often heavily modified vernacular languages to be bearers of 19th century modernity. These guardians of language faced significant...

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled word, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.

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...

so is blurred so is blurred in me what white-haired gentleman separated once and for all and said this in the subject this is the object we fall asleep with one hand under our head...

It was made clear to me that Music is related to everything, especially nature and language, but in order to speak it naturally, I had to first make myself a part of it.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.

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

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light...

Translation is the art of failure.

What you should do,” she told Fat during one of his darker hours, “is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34.” Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a...

Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress

Modernist discourse […] incorporates semantic devices – such as the labeling of theism as ‘religion’ and naturalism as ‘science’ – that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the...

I do not mean, of course, that we can always accurately express our conscious thoughts with Proustian accuracy. Consciousness overflows language: we perceive vastly more than we can describe.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

…that it is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

The fact that in the twentieth century a greater proportion of the people in the world could communicate with one another, using English or just a few other languages, appears not to have stopped any...

Language most shews a man: Speak, that I may see thee.

My parents would not permit ugly language in the house, which was okay with me. I didn’t want to learn German anyway.

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

A fine writer must appreciate and accept the power of language manifestly.

Language is what we use to tell stories, transmit knowledge, and build social bonds. It comforts, tickles, excites, and destroys. Every society has language, and somehow we all learn a language in the first few...

Kati ya nchi yako na serikali yako ni kitu gani unakipenda zaidi? Ipende zaidi nchi yako, kuliko serikali yako!

A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.

Isn’t language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world’s people? Perhaps, but it’s a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express...

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...

Furniture or gold can be taken away from you, but knowledge and a new language can easily be taken from one place to the other, and nobody can take them away from you.

The term “political correctness” has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell’s “Thought Police” and fascist regimes.

I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.

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