I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I’m not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro’s skin. But I can’t relate to...

The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of...

I’d studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly

That one of history’s greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.

I’ve had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I’m also helpless in two or three other languages.

There were seven men, but just one language. They also moved as one and ate one meal a day and slept in the same bed and knew the same women with whom they’d made the...

By the 1920s if you wanted to work behind a lunch counter you needed to know that ‘Noah’s boy’ was a slice of ham (since Ham was one of Noah’s sons) and that ‘burn one’...

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able...

I’m a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I’m an evangelist of popular culture, but when there’s only media, then there’s going to be a slow debasement of language, and that’s what...

The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance....

A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

Well… “why” is a hard question to answer in any language.

I wish I didn’t need words to speak to her. They sometimes hold very different meanings for us both.

Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the white peoples of the world...

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty...

They say that maths is a language. So how do I order a pizza with extra cheese in maths?

Very few graduates have that combination of skills … many students are shying away from language courses and travelling to places like Indonesia or Malaysia because of the terror warnings.

Love is the essence of life,Love is the universal language of all creation,Love is the eternal desire,Love is the life’s flower with fragrance to share,So feel the longing for love and being beloved.

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...

As it was all was lost. He was alive, yes, he was alive, he felt this for the first time. But he knew now that he was living in a prison, that he had to...

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line ‘Don’t palm all your abuses [of language upon me]’ was possibly too rude. ‘It’s in the book,’ I said. He didn’t hit me.

The Holy Bible is the Spirit of God exposed to humanity in the Language of Heaven.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.

Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.

It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain...

My books are a word feast.

Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?

There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this...

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but...

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

Even English Language doesn’t provide you with the Synonyms of the word Success.

The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can’t read.

She liked the word ineffable because it meant a feeling so big or vast that it could not be expressed in words.And yet, because it could not be expressed in words, people had invented a...

Cat’s friends seemed like very sweet girls,” Dad says.”They were the bomb,” I say fervently, and he looks back at me with raised eyebrows.”‘The bomb’ is a good thing? Like ‘sick’?”Duh,” I reply, and Dad...

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty...

As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and...

When somebody speaks a language that we don’t know, we often imagine that some important things are being said!

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.

Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.

It is much easier to learn another language when you are young, enthusiastic and unembarrassed.

Empty words degrade language.

Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

It’s now what enters men’s mouths that’s evil. It’s what comes out of their mouths that is.

Languages are not strangers to on another.

Ask, ‘How are we different from the great apes?’ We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.

Utterances of cursed language defiles the hearts and souls of man and many.

But psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, ‘describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands’.