Grammar, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

There is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression… We have yet to become fluent in the...

How different things might be if, rather than saying “I think I’m in love,” we were saying “I’ve connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love.”...

Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women’s hair rhapsodically described, women’s faces acclaimed in odelike language.

Language may have limits. But it isn’t just a dim likeness in a mirror. Yes, gestures, glances, touches, taps on walls mean something. So do silences. But sometimes the word is the thing. The bridge....

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

Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don’t believe me? Get with the program, crackpot!

The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.

Love is the secret language of the heart which everyone can understand.

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to...

please don’t cook me, kind sirs! I am a good cook myself, and cook better than I cook, if you see what I mean.

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

The devastating repercussions of hate-filled language manifest in very real ways for today’s LGBTQ youth.

Language as putative science. – The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to...

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

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.

He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn’t, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned...

Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude...

As you can see, the hyphen is a nasty, tricky, evil little mark that gets its kicks igniting arguments in newsrooms and trying to make everyone in the English-speaking world look like an idiot –...

The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it.

The unfortunate are not as miserable as the world imagines. That urchins, the handicapped, orphans, prisoners and others are much happier than people think. And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force...

One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish’s ‘Monster Blood Tattoo,’ in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There’s no real cognitive...

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and...

I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the...

Time is the secret language of God which no one can understand.

Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered...

By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is...

Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it.

Sure. God knows what’s important.

Everyone said the language barrier was one of the issues. But when the game starts, I know how it’s played. So all the conversations with the pitchers are something I know. It’s not like we’re...

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a word is worth a million pictures. A billion. As many as there are people who know the word. Each has their own picture, their...

I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and...

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

No, no, it’s not the books you are looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and...

Try telling the boy who’s just had his girlfriend’s namecut into his arm that there’s slippage between the signifierand the signified. Or better yet explain to the girlwho watched in the mirror as the tattoo...

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on...

It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having...

And adab towards language means the recognition and acknowledgement of the rightful and proper place of every word in a written or uttered sentence so as not to produce a dissonance in meaning, sound and...

thank you” in multiple languages.

He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly...

Sharon, … has learned the language of the possible.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

Music is a language.