My nail is a bit rusty.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

The Latin word for sausage was botulus, from which English gets two words. One of them is the lovely botuliform, which means sausage-shaped and is a more useful word than you might think. The other...

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

We all know that there are language forms that are considered impolite and out of order, no matter what truths these languages might be carrying. If you talk with a harsh, urbanized accent and you...

When the meaning is unclear there is no meaning.

We feel more than we can express, we see more than we can say.

They thought that hieroglyphs were a secret language … that they were ideograms that could more accurately relate hidden mysteries about human life and nature.

How do we acquire our first language? Fist we hear it, then we understand it, then we speak it, then we read it, then we write it.

And on the way home I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some...

It’s an amazing thing, really, it’s a legitimate language. There are only a certain amount of people in the world who can speak it, like Oxford professors and what not. It’s such a beautiful language...

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

The time of using language of bullying and coercion . ‘ . ‘ . is over. There is no evidence to prove Iran’s diversion (toward nuclear weapons).

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed...

Looking at what ‘foreplay’ is, ‘sexual intercourse’ is a game.

There’s just no explicit language in that statute that says … it is illegal for a john to pay a prostitute for sex in a room or in a spa or in a motel or...

If this hast been done to language, I fear to know the fate of all else.

[M]y favorite teacher was explaining that you don’t say but however. These are pleonasms: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. There are times in life that are very but however.

Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor,...

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there...

In science fiction, telepaths often communicate across language barriers, since thoughts are considered to be universal. However, this might not be true. Emotions and feelings may well be nonverbal and universal, so that one could...

If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we...

China’s cinema has been rising for some time; it has more exposure, so my chances of becoming internationally known are better. But the first thing I have to do is learn English. If I can...

Music is a language – and language, at its finest, should be music.

I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.

Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were taught the same language. Where did they get it? We know now, that it requires a great number of years...

To speak a language that was as intimate and free as certain dreams, saying darkly, thrillingly, My cock inside of you. Your come in my mouth … He focused on the boy’s slim, tight hips;...

I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.

Gods were preserved but languages were exterminated: thus was the conqueror’s will

Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual’s special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as...

It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between...

I like you; your eyes are full of language.”[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

i lost a whole continent.a whole continent from my memory.unlike all other hyphenated americans my hyphen is made of blood.when africa says hellomy mouth is a heartbreakbecause i have nothing in my tongueto answer her.i...

Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people and...

The species greatest harvest ― words.

The thing she realised in that moment, that fraction of waiting, was lost. Nothing could bring the thing back, no words could make the thing solid and visible and therefore to be coped with. Solid...

The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language.

At Ungaro, I discovered the flou and the language of Paris.

To knock today’s prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday’s prestige dialects.

It’s a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. […] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I...

A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man

Music is the language of all. It tames the savage beast and allows us to get over heartbreak. It helps us express what we really want to say and it has the power to lift...

a Novilíngua diferia da maior parte das outras línguas porque o seu vocabulário ia diminuindo em vez de aumentar todos os anos. Cada redução era um ganho, pois quanto menor a área de escolha, menor...

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary and the greater one’s awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more...

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

It’s not about the language, it’s about the message

AimlesslyIt pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. NoOne listens to poetry.— from “Thing Language

It was real Cheyenne. I would get the translations the night before, but it was very difficult because it was not like any other language you would be familiar with.