Being a poet one confronts the limitation of language, how can the spirit be revealed under any restrictions.

Faeces by any other name would smell as gross

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: “introit,” “offertory,” “liturgy,” “movable feast,” “the minor elevation,” “the lavabo,” “the apparition of Lourdes,” and hundreds more....

A body is a body, but only voices are capable of love

Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we’ll never meet.It’s the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children...

Buenos dias,” she said in response to Hernandez’s soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.

Ileż zdań można utworzyć z dwudziestu czterech liter alfabetu? Ileż znaczeń można wyprowadzić z setek chwastów, grudek i innych drobiazgów?

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul

Language is fossil Poetry.

I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred...

The big problem in translating is that we had to translate the language. People may not know that we record the podcast in Japanese, translate it to English and then actors play us on the...

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t...

Words are such fun!

Fie, fie upon her! There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.

For most of my life, I have received messages – images and worded communications, sometimes even in an ancient language – that came to me from above.

A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.

Language is something you inherit, it’s never just you doing the talking, which helps when you’re pretending.

Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a ‘footnote’ to colonial history about the ‘revolt’ of the American colonies....

of” the world, we even lose sometimes the capacity to keep that breath moving in our language.

What if, right now, as we’re immolating language, we’re doing away with ourselves? Maybe we’ve regressed. The skills we once used for survival – scattered attention, diffuse concentration – have been adapted to finding glowing...

I can’t write anymore. My words are paper airplanes tenuously gliding towards the dust. The wonder of the Phoenicians, which throughout the latter part of this entry I have not fully comprehended, is getting vaguer...

Before you judge me as some kind of ‘anything goes’ language heathen, let me just say that I’m not against usage standards. I don’t violate them when I want to sound like an educated person,...

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?

Man acts as though he were the sharper and the master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Music is exciting and easy to enjoy, the rhythm and voice.It does not need interpretation. That is why it is called the Universal Language.

Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially...

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: “Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is...

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one...

I should learn the language of a politician – give away as little and keep the rest to yourself. Not lie, I just want to be more guarded.

There is one thing I like about the Poles—their language. Polish, when it is spoken by intelligent people, puts me in ecstasy. The sound of the language evokes strange images in which there is always...

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

I picked up a new language a few months ago. It was just laying on the ground, dirty, so I scooped it up and popped it in my mouth.

It’s only words… unless they’re true.

Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.

A civil tongue speaks the language of masters. An uncivil tongue reveals character flaws of its master.

English is not merely a language anymore; it has become a way of life for millions of non-native English speakers around the world.

Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?

I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me.There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. (“Substitutions”)

The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.

Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true...

You have to watch your language. People will think you have no fucking class

There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the...

A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same...

Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of...

Suddenly, they were asking for dozens of redactions of the exact same language they’d cleared before.

In the grammar of the phallus — the I, I, I — [woman] can’t utter female experience.