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...

[…] mi sembra che il linguaggio venga sempre usato in modo approssimativo, casuale, sbadato, e ne provo un fastidio intollerabile.

He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction, a look of hatred unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the...

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

Oftentimes, people meet our writing before they meet us; our writing is our first impression.People read our résumés, cover letters, proposals, and emails, and that’s the basis on which we are judged first. If our...

How many words are you having trouble with, sir?Just the ones that I’ve highlighted.I count at least a dozen, and I haven’t gotten out of the first paragraph.That’s as far as I got, too. I’m...

Right on cue, I figured out the letter that comes after P.

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it...

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.

Language may have limits. But it isn’t just a dim likeness in a mirror. Yes, gestures, glances, touches, taps on walls mean something. So do silences. But sometimes the word is the thing. The bridge....

The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot.

Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don’t believe me? Get with the program, crackpot!

The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.

Love is the secret language of the heart which everyone can understand.

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to...