Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

How beautiful to touch another’s soul with a word, a gesture, a thought.

It might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language.

She spoke with the usual cadences of the young: sentences curling upward at the end, all statements fading into a smoky, implied question mark, as though nothing could be said with any reasonable certainty.

Language is a bountiful gift and its usage, an elaboration of community and society, is a sacred work. Language and usage evolve over time: elements change, are reborn or forgotten, and while there are instances...

And I’m working at trying to find a kind of language where I won’t be so easily modulated by expectation.

This is the Southland burr, the only distinctive regional accent in the country. It’s a soft appealing noise, deriving, I presume, from the Sottish settlers, but resembling no known Scottish accent. It’s simply Kiwi English...

If there’s any interaction between genes and languages, it is often languages that influence genes, since linguistic differences between populations lessen the chance of genetic exchange between them.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

They confront us and deal with us in a very harsh and illegal language, but ultimately they need us more than we need them.

I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the...

Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.

When a man is in love how can he use old words? Should a woman desiring her lover lie down with grammarians and linguists? I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love’s...

Verily, for nine hundred years have I lost. Everyone I knew is dead, the empire gone, and who knows in what state the world is left. Should what thy sister reports prove true, much hath...

No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.

Language is a social art.

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

. . . we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and...

Given Loughner’s obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate...

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people’s linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.

thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful.” (169).

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language...

Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism.

The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as “the environment” — that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound division between it an ourselves. We have given up the understanding...

Grammar, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

The language of truth is simple.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Verbalize someone’s actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in...

He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be...

Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful,...

A schoolchild should be taught grammar–for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and...

I like the way he says we and am amazed, as I often am by language as power, at the way a simple pronoun can upend a relationship.

Language has created a barrier that prevents us from seeing existence as it truly is.

He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service–the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back...

As Luxenberg’s work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do...

One of the most blissful joys of the English language is the fact that one of its greatest practitioners ever, one of the guys on the very top table of all, was a jokesmith. Though...

I [set aside] half an hour to study language.

So he was always in the town at one place or another, drinking, knocking about with the men he knew. It really wearied him. He talked to barmaids, to almost any woman, but there was...

Language as putative science. – The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to...

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all...

The word begone is a Russian doll. A small, single word, which contains so many others; and when all the smaller words inside line up, they look like a bridge: Be Beg Ego Go On...

The word very will vary in muchiness. I love you very much, and that won’t vary from day to day.

I’m bilingual, speaking English and body language. I prefer the latter, because I can speak it silently and without listening and while my back is turned.

We have nothing in common.” Comfortable silence proves just how much we do.

He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn’t, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned...