The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

To understand the universe, you must know the language of time.

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this.

The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing ‘strength from the depths of the universe’; Malcolm...

Language… has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.

Companies use language that’s worked in the past, so prospectuses become bigger and bigger mountains of words,

One of the characteristics of New Labour – and Miliband is irredeemably of that species – is that, in the guise of a new liberal language, it has adopted the age-old default mode of British...

The words we choose can build communities, reunite loved ones, and inspire others. They can be a catalyst for change. However, our words also have the power to destroy and divide: they can start a...

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled...

With wine and being lost, withless and less of both:I rode through the snow, do you read meI rode God far–I rode Godnear, he sang,it wasour last ride overthe hurdled humans.They cowered whenthey heard usoverhead,...

The way I make art – the way a lot of people make art – is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important.

So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it...

In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of...

Language is the archives of history.

As Richard has pointed out on several occasions, I subscribe to the irregular verb theory of life: I am a trained investigator, you have a healthy curiosity, she/he is a nosy parker.

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

There’s a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

Language is the key to the heart of people.

RIBROASTER, n. Censorious language by oneself concerning another. The word is of classical refinement, and is even said to have been used in a fable by Georgius Coadjutor, one of the most fastidious writers of...

Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives – darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by...

…he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech...

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

There is no ‘cat language.’ Painful as it is for us to admit, they don’t need one!

No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that’s one of its functions – so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.

Sometimes language can’t even read the music of meaning.

Where story comes from, I don’t know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can’t explain,...

…there is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese…. (p. 111)

When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others–using it as a way of setting...

Worte entfremden. Sprache ist kein Medium für Begehren. Begehren ist Hingerissensein, nicht Austausch. Nur dadurch, dass die Sprache das Begehrte entfremdet, beherrscht sie es.

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.

Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.

Lie, illusion, deception, she said–was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

My definition of dictionary can’t be found in the dictionary. Dictionary—A linguistic prison, confining words to well-defined cells, with little chance of parole.

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life...

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything’s handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture,...

The power of language – it can heal and build, or corrupt, poison, destroy, desecrate, annihilate…

There’s probably a word for that,” but there’s probably a word for that.

Annoyance has made me bilingual.

For most people, language is our primary interface with each other and with the external world.

You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when...

Thank God for modern medicine. It was not until 1905 that ergophobia (the morbid fear of returning to work) was first identified and reported in the British Medical Journal. As yet there is no known...

Mocho was a Spanish word that meant maimed or referred to something that had been lopped off like a stump. To call Homer el mocho was, essentially, to call him “Stumpy” or “the maimed one.”...

There’s been a lot of work on bilingualism. Interpretation goes one step beyond that because the two languages are active simultaneously. And not just in one modality, because you have perception and production at the...

Jokes are many things. ‘Funny’ is only one of them.

The topics which language limits us to aren’t much worth discussing in the first place.(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

A niechaj narodowie wżdy postronni znają,Iż Polacy nie gęsi, iż swój język mają.

Language is the light of the mind.

Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time?” – “When Our Lips Speak Together