What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don’t have language for. What fascinates me about that is we’re talking about an art form in which...

We’re guardedly happy. Meanwhile, we’ll go on with our mission as before: training language students. We did it yesterday, we’re doing it today and we’ll do it tomorrow.

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs,...

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

Status-driven, conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty.

It is wrong to use equal language for unequal actions.

He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so...

The most delightful aspect about the language of cinema is that it speaks to each of us in different ways – it is a purely subjective experience.

Mal nommer un objet, c’est ajouter au malheur de ce monde. Et justement la grande misère humaine qui a longtemps poursuivi [Brice] Parain et qui lui a inspiré des accents si émouvants, c’est le mensonge....

A book, child. A book just for you, in a lost language.

The people of South Sudan are ethnically different. They have their own language, and many of them are Christians. It is based on identity.

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on...

You must sit down to speak this language,It is so heavy you can’t be polite or chatter in it.For once you have begun a sentence, the whole course of your life is laid out before...

In the beginning was the Word.

Your thoughts are certain kinds of seeds in your life. You can water them and allow them to grow on fertile soil. Or, you can let them diminish and wither amongst the weeds. Be careful...

Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters...

In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

Thank God for immigrants. They’re the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are “evolving” past. I don’t know what they’re saying, but...

We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.

The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I’m trying to convey) is only one part of it....

age” whatsoever.

The three most dreaded words in the English language are ‘negative cash flow’.

I’ve never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.

Invisible prose only!” rules out the sparkling style of [writers]. . . For [whom] vivid prose, and the visionary mind it evinces, rich with speculation, insight, and subjectivity, is the craft and offers a unique...

One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds....

If one is talking about a vile thing it is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is less likely to be seduced into excusing it.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

I can kick the can down the road, and I can also kick other modal verbs.

I still notice the burned house, mornings, when I walk along the beach. “Well, obviously I do not notice the house. What I notice is what remains of the house. One is still prone to...

When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies.

Betrug und Schönheit der Sprache bestehen darin, dass sie das ganze Universum zu ordnen scheint und uns zu der Annahme verführt, wir lebten in Anbetracht eines rationalen Raumes, einer möglichen Harmonie. Doch da Wörter uns...

The worst kind of oppression is when the victims think and talk in the language of their oppressors.

Words can’t save you, but they can give you courage.

FV: Annandale defines ‘definition’ as “an explanation of the signification of a term.” Yet Oxford, on the other hand, defines it as “a statement of the precise meaning of a word.” A small, perhaps negligible...

Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.

How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve?...

You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.

A man’s words reveal, first, the man. The words are not the man, and yet they reveal him faithfully and are to be identified with him. Out of the abundance of the heart, the man...

Loose and forbear!

You may imagine the joy manifested by these poor Africans, when they heard one of their own color address them in a friendly manner, and in a language they could comprehend!

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Learning a language is not interesting than knowing how it works.

All language is an aspiration to music.

And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by...

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

I want to live in Kolkata; I don’t want to live in Europe – I can’t write there. I write in Bengali, and I need to be surrounded by the Bengali language and culture.