The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

How emigration is actually lived – well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and...

You can’t see other’s point of view when you have only one language.

We commonly speak as though a single ‘thing’ could ‘have’ some characteristic. A stone, we say, is ‘hard,’ ‘small,’ ‘heavy,’ ‘yellow,’ ‘dense,’ etc. That is how our language is made: ‘The stone is hard.’ And...

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.

Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences.

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses...

I speak the language of love. I just have no idea what it means.

I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here’s the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo....

They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not...

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and...

I never knew what language they’d lapse into when fucked – Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English).

Tyranny begins with the laws of grammar.

What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the...

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

To abandon language is to stop/creating a place other than your own life/in which to live. It is to enter/the terrible certainty of the flesh. Even god/is only possible through language.

So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can’t help it.

I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt...

Das Recht ist kein Kreißsaal für die Gerechtigkeit und hat niemals behauptet, einer zu sein. Das Recht besteht aus Gesetzen, Gesetze bestehen aus Wörtern, und Wörter können manches sein, sicher aber nicht gerecht.

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.

The books brought brilliance to my life, and they brought an understanding: Life is a story. Everything that has happened and will happen to me is all part of the story of this enchanted place...

Language is changing constantly; printing and modern education have slowed it but have not stopped it. Given all this change, when, exactly, was language PERFECT, in the language pundit’s mind? One has the feeling that...

Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do.

Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain. It´s about declaring what is just and what is unjust,...

In our evolution language has been the greatest single contribution to our understanding and misunderstanding

I’m online, therefore I am.

Our memory fragments don’t have any coherence until they’re imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

I think it’s cool to do stuff in a different language. Basically, I learned English through listening to rap. A lot of people think it’s funny. But it’s true; I used to try to get...

Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have...

Few people…have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with...

kisses… areand always will be the only language that I will have ever truly known.

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is...

The polyglot is a linguistic nomad.

Women speak two languages – one of which is verbal.

There’s a big need for speech-language personnel to meet the needs of (students).

The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in...

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same...

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on...

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it...

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.

Dearest creature in creation,Study English pronunciation.I will teach you in my verseSounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.I will keep you, Suzy, busy,Make your head with heat grow dizzy.Tear in eye, your dress will tear.So...

A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere – no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to...

The years of his life had not been gentle, and there was something untamable about him; his eyes seemed to say everything and nothing at all, almost as if they spoke a dying language few...

The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become–and such lucidity is a form of joy.

What’s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I’ll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for...