Words themselves are all the ghosts we need.

You should never let a word control you, intimidate you, or make you uncomfortable, and that applies to people of all races. Intent is where insult lies, and hate. Not in language.

I should make a tongue condom shaped like an oven mitt, so my mouth’s spoken language muscle is protected from hot coffee.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a...

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the...

It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between “literally” and “figuratively.” If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you...

All talk is small talk.

What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system.

Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal...

Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a...

I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.

Time is the language of the universe.

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

That’s what novels are: They’re amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

Afrikaans was the language of the white minority in South Africa, and the forced learning of it created resentment among blacks. Even so, Nelson Mandela made it a point to learn this language in prison...

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

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.

There’s a scientific hypothesis that every person’s name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there...

A language is as sweet as the tongues of the speakers.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain – and there is no reason to think that those alternatives...

There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate...

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me...

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellowmen bestows it upon...

It’s high poverty. It’s high English-language learners. It’s a school with many challenges, and still they made their targets. We’ll look at their successes.

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

I study hard at Russian, which is a tough but most attractive language.

Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However the words in a great poet’s phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind...

Words for completely novel concepts and technical breakthroughs are devised as soon as needed, explained with ease and absorbed with scarcely an effort by all who need them. This ability to innovate in language is...

Hablar bien, expresarse correctamente en español, no es conocer mil palabras y vomitarlas machaconamente; supone el conocimiento preciso de cada término, su raíz filológica, el empleo justo de cada vocablo en el momento adecuado evitando...

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me”, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad...

To touch a person…to sleep with a person…is to become a pioneer,” she whispered then, “a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you...

Universal grammar is about what language is: it is to be distinguished from prescriptive grammars, often distilled in newspaper columns, which tell us what language should be. We are all entitled to our own opinions...

Moracete da se pomirite sa gubitkom jednog dela svog samopostovanja i svoje brige o ponosu ukoliko stvarno zelite da napredujete.

I know your head aches. I know you’re tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher’s window. But think what you’re trying to accomplish – just think what you’re dealing...

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can’t deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it...

It’s no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase “As pretty as an airport” appear

The tongue of man is a twisty thing.

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

Oh, bullshit. This isn’t one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he’s on the grill....

Whatever the final language, it will be the benchmark of how other negotiations are judged. Since the auto workers won pensions in ’48, a lot of things Detroit has done, for good or for bad,...

The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as “snakes” or “roaches”. This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that...