My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t...

Words are such fun!

Fie, fie upon her! There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.

For most of my life, I have received messages – images and worded communications, sometimes even in an ancient language – that came to me from above.

The Swedish language combines the strong manhood of the German with the delicate beauty of the Italian.

With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.

Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life.

To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected...

Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world’s great diplomats, surely.

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent...

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it...

One senses that Hegel was possible only in German, and finds it natural that Locke in a language where large and red precede apple should have arrived at the thing after sorting out its sensory...

From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.

Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back.

The locust has no kingJust noise and hard languageThey talk me over

Fuck words, nothing spokencomprehends the defiantly ephemeral.I take my incompleteness with the rest, an exilein any language.

The thinking behind that is that if you teach them in their own language first, by the time they learn english it’s much easier to integrate them in the classroom.

I remember reading once that some fellows use language to conceal thought; but it’s been my experience that a good many more use it instead of thought.

…The efficacy of psychedelics with regard to art has to do with their ability to render language weightless, as fluid and ephemeral as those famous “bubble letters” of the sixties. Psychedelics, I think, disconnect both...

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn’t stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the...

Immortality” may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is...

The world was full of waistrels and waifs, sycophants and spies – all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect

The only French I know is a kiss. I studied a lot of that foreign tongue in high school.

This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells – better yet, he’s a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith...

I also think pronunciation of a foreign tongue could be better taught than by demanding from the pupil those internal acrobatic feats that are generally impossible and always useless. This is the sort of instruction...

Languages, symbols and universals do not change, they cannot by virtue of what they – thus, with the passing of the Ages, Tradition does not change, but the form in which it decides to manifest...

Over the years, I’ve trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.

The writer’s job is to free language from the prison of ideas.

She said the words, and then she had a strange moment of seeing them, hanging there over her head. “You’re going to vacuum up that squirrel!”There is just no predicting what kind of sentences you...

Communication is not so much about what you say, as what you don’t say.

Great language and great literature do not survive long without each other

As a matter of fact, that’s the reason why I’ve learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish...

The language of physics is not math, but physics.

Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.

Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of...

Suddenly, they were asking for dozens of redactions of the exact same language they’d cleared before.

In the grammar of the phallus — the I, I, I — [woman] can’t utter female experience.

Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.

gatherer of beautiful things.

[…] marginile unei cărţi nu sunt niciodată clar şi riguros trasate: dincolo de titlu, de primele r nduri şi de punctul final, mai presus de configuraţia sa internă şi de forma care îi conferă autonomie,...

The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!

Cine mută vorbele dintr-o limbă într-alta își lasă sufletul pe m na diavolului (…) Că p nă tu te g ndești și la o vorbă, și la cealaltă, duhul tău stă, nehotăr t, pe deasupra...

I tried to think the same thought in as many different religions as possible, so the thought itself wouldn’t be limited by any particular way of reasoning, the way words restrict — the whole eskimo-seventeen-words-for-snow...

To make a simple change of a typeface can instantly transform text which had the appearance and tone of a joyous announcement to suddenly convey that of a somber tragedy.

Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and...

We believe that information is an enlightening agent, but I can assure you it is not. We consume information, but we can’t read. We forgot how to sit down and engage the dense layers of...

If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.