Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I’ve seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me.

A word is used “correctly” when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of “correctness”. The literary definition would substitute, for the...

So is language change progress or degeneration? It is neither, of course. To assert that language change is for the better or worse requires some measure of what “good” or “bad” language is, and the...

He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange...

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of...

woof” in cat.

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world...

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers — namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say,...

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

How emigration is actually lived – well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and...

You can’t see other’s point of view when you have only one language.

We commonly speak as though a single ‘thing’ could ‘have’ some characteristic. A stone, we say, is ‘hard,’ ‘small,’ ‘heavy,’ ‘yellow,’ ‘dense,’ etc. That is how our language is made: ‘The stone is hard.’ And...

Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It’s a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.

After learning the foreign language Gibberish, I became a dream spokesman.

English isn’t my first language—gibberish is.

Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit.

If Jupiter was in the ascendant when you were born, you are of a jovial disposition; and if you’re not jovial but miserable and saturnine that’s a disaster, because a disaster is a dis-astro, or...

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need,...

No. See, when you throw up you’re vomiting, but when you throw down you’re starting a fight, as in throwing down the gauntlet.””Ohhhh,” he said. “I thought you were speaking literally.””I do beg your pardon....

Only through action, through living, can we escape from the prison of thought and language.

Well,’said Ernest, ‘by some strange coincidence I know this story.’Boddichek was not good at irony. ‘I knew that there was that possibility,’ he said, ‘but we have a great new way to treat it, and...

Most Iraqis are really cool people. I picked up some of their language. There are good and bad people everywhere. So many people there lived under fear. They distrust the military because it’s scary for...

Language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. It is...

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.

Time is the secret language of the universe which no one can understand.

Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another...

It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of ‘the logical form’ of a statement; as if...

When you have a strongly held belief, don’t you think it’s important to express that belief accurately?

Who cares what colour your hair or what shape your shape is? Who cares what religion your religion or what language your language is? What is the colour of your heart? That is all that...

They can be like the sun, words.They can do for the heart what light can for a field.

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the ‘transformation of being into message’ (more commonly, ‘linguistic turn’). ‘Being that can be be understood is...

slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language.

Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.

Sometimes a person who is utterly devoid of charm will try to create a good impression by using very elegant language; yet he only succeeds in being ridiculous.

I want do a Mandarin language movie. It’ll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next.

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language,...

I phoned the Admiral back.’It’s no use, Admiral, the French speak nothing but French.’There was a short pause on the end of the line then his voice rattled into life like a sabre.’They’re lying, Tim!”What?”The...

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

There are moments in life that are beyond language,

Just remember, when someone has an accent, it means that he knows one more language than you do.

There’s a big need for speech-language personnel to meet the needs of (students).

The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in...

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same...

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on...

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it...