We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.

J’ai entendu tant de raisonnements qui ont failli me tourner la tête, et qui ont tourné suffisamment d’autres têtes pour les faire consentir à l’assassinat, que j’ai compris que tout le malheur des hommes venait...

PANTOMIME, n. A play in which the story is told without violence to the language. The least disagreeable form of dramatic action.

The next night, alone in the tent, Laurent said: ‘As we draw closer to the border, I think it would be safer–more private–to hold our discussions in your language rather than mine.’He said it in...

We can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment that they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to...

We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you’re an ass.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in...

Non per forza, non per arme, non per essere altri obbligati a saperla, ma solamente per la bellezza e leggiadria sua è da forestiere genti amata, imparata, onorata in tal guisa che nel comune parlare...

Now we have come full circle to the subtitle of this book: children learn by unlearning other languages. Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in the...

ahthOOn SSyng!” I said. “That’s farewell.””It sounds evil.””It is,” I answered, and we parted.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perception of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking...

My Japanese isn’t much better today, but at least now I appreciate my duality more than when I was a punk kid.

Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.

Words can be medicines; they can also be poisons. Words can heal; they can also kill… It all depends on how, when and where they are use and against whom! Let us not abuse our...

If language had been the creation, not of poetry, but of logic, we should only have one.

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.

I am illiterate. Just not in English.

Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?

Words are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in “foreign commerce” on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are...

Break the ice, or draw that which lives in the dimness out into the full light of speech – what happens is the same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in...

Language is the proper way to communicate, followed closely by five balled up fingers forming a fist and flying at a face. Violence is never the answer—unless the question is: What the fuck are you...

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains’ capacity to cope with any further irregularity

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

A metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression (a form of words) used for artistic or rhetorical purposes; instead, it is a process of human understanding by which we achieve meaningful experience that we can...

It is hard to say anything as true as saying nothing.

Out of 1.6 billion Muslims, perhaps only 300 million actually understand the language of the Koran.

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important – in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.

Words have power.

The language of the universe is not math, but physics.

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

Love had to be deeper than that, than a glance over tea, which was indicative but not dispositive.

I found in investigative journalism it is always best, if you have any language skills, not to admit them.

But isn’t this a dance? Isn’t all of this a dance? Isn’t that what we do with words? Isn’t that what we do when we talk, when we spar, when we make plans or leave...

Yesterday’s abomination is today’s rule.

The fisherman of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or ‘feeling-thinking’ to define language that speaks the truth. Eduardo Galeano

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

One out of four students that we have in the county schools speak another first language. It’s helpful to have bilingual teachers to be able to communicate with parents. In some cases, the students may...

Music is its own language – if you don’t speak it, it’s hard to say what you’re trying to do.

Isn’t language amazing? I can’t get over it. Sometimes you can just say things and its like a bomb that blows all your clothes off and suddenly there you are naked. I don’t know if...

Language is the dress of thoughts.

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of...

The language in this version appeals more to organizations than individual users, especially concerning patents. There is more reference to suing companies that don’t respect the license.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of...

Once upon a time there were two countries, at war with each other. In order to make peace after many years of conflict, they decided to build a bridge across the ocean.But because they never...