language Quotes

″‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.‘”

“I told him that we rapped. He didn’t know what rap music was, so I did my best to explain it to him. ‘It is similar to telling parables, but in the white man’s language,’ I concluded.”

“Modernism in art contributed to the new and challenging literary styles that were emerging in Paris and throughout Europe.[...] The new generation of writers believed that the elaborate language so typical of 19th century literature was a decadence.”

″‘I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.′ ‘That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.”

“They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”

“That, and so many other smaller incidents in my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”

“Some [crayons] are spelled wrong on purpose for a joke, like Mauvelous, that’s not very funny I don’t think.”

″‘I’ll get bigger and bigger and bigger till I turn into a human.’ ‘Actually, you’re a human already,’ says Ma. ‘Human’s what we both are.’ I thought the word for us was real.”

“Language is a finer medium.”

“A big part of the tutor’s job was to steer the players away from the professors and courses most likely to lead to lack of performance. The majority of the football team wound up majoring in ‘Criminal Justice.’ What Criminal Justice had going for it was that it didn’t require any math or language skills. Criminal Justice classes were also almost always filled with other football players.”

“All symbols were in Smith’s vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard rightly.”

“The woman’s last speech had contained symbols new to him and those which were not new had been arranged in fashions not easily understood. But he was happy that the flavor had been suitable for communication between water brothers—although touched with something disturbing and terrifyingly pleasant.”

″‘Yes, Jubal. You—’ Smith stopped, looked embarrassed. ‘I again have not words. I will read and read and read, until I find words. Then I will teach my brother.‘”

“It was not possible to separate in the Martian tongue the human concepts: ‘religion,’ ‘philosophy,’ and ‘science’—and, since Mike thought in Martian, it was not possible for him to tell them apart.”

“You need to think in Martian to grok the word ‘grok.‘”

“If instead of saying ‘I am in love’ we say ‘I am loving’ or ‘I will love.’ Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.”

“The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.”

“A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.”

“You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party.”

“I’ve taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak English: the best looking women in the world. I’m seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of wood.”

“I was quite frightened once or twice because Eliza was doing it so well. You see, lots of the real people can’t do it at all: they’re such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn.”

“One thing is certain, the language was ineffaceably stamped upon my brain, though for a long time no one knew it, least of all myself.”

“How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words were where they said Bury me in the old churchyard! A tremor passed over his body. How sad and how beautiful! He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music. The bell! The bell! Farewell! O farewell!”

“…a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

“Eileen had long white hands. One evening when playing tig she had put her hands over his eyes: long and white and thin and cold and soft. That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory.”

“I tried to tell her all that had happened, all that I’d come to understand: the meaningless objectness of the world, the universal bruteness. She only stared, troubled at my noise. She’d forgotten all language long ago, or maybe had never known any.”

“We often sit together at my kitchen table. The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us—we couldn’t use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.”

“It took me a moment. And then I realized the difference. He was speaking to me in Yiddish.”

“Tatiana’s English wasn’t very good, and often I couldn’t understand her letters. But I waited for them eagerly.”

“No . . . You can’t understand. You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.”

“A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.”

“I started again. This time I didn’t write about real things and I didn’t write about imaginary things. I wrote about the only thing I knew. The pages piled up.”

“Mastery of language affords remarkable power.”

“We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”

“I love you in a language that I don’t fully understand. In words that I haven’t found enough courage to forklift out of my chest.”

“Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.”

″(Christophine) had a quiet voice and a quiet laugh (when she did laugh), and though she could speak good English if she wanted to, and French as well as patois, she took care to talk as they talked.”

″‘What you do with her money, eh?’ Her voice was still quiet but with a hiss in it when she said ‘money.’ I thought, of course, that is what all the rigamarole is about. I no longer felt dazed, tired, half-hypnotized, but alert and wary, ready to defend myself.”

″(Christophine) is intelligent in her way and can express herself well, but I did not like the look of her at all, and consider her a most dangerous person. My wife insisted that she had gone back to Martinique her native island, and was very upset that I had mentioned the matter even in such a roundabout fashion.”

“Say nothing and it may not be true.”

“It was their talk about Christophine that changed Coulibri, not the repairs or the new furniture or the strange faces. Their talk about Christophine and obeah changed it.”

“One day in the woods he met an Indian. They stood in the wet, cold woods and looked at each other, and they could not talk because they did not know each other’s words.”

“Strange, strange, that manner of voice pricks me. We’ve come into contact before, I’m sure we have.”

“The word itself is music.”

“Somehow, of late, I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word ‘prefer’ upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce?”

“I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume; but in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, ‘I would prefer not to.‘”

″‘I know you,’ he said, without looking round – ‘and I want nothing to say to you.‘”

“One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”

“Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.”

“The word no, so short, so easy to say, a child’s sound, a noise more than a word, a short exhalation of air: all he had to do was part his lips, and the word would come out, and—and what?”

“They are conversation-openers in the arcane femine language of Shoe.”

“She touched the necklace, giving the word for it, and I gave mine. We pointed out other things – the spring, the cave, a gull flying, the sun and the sky, Rontu asleep – trading the names for them and laughing because they were so different. We sat there on the rock until the sun was in the west and played this game. Then Tutok rose and made a gesture of farewell.”

“Neither the mouse nor the boy was the least bit surprised that each could understand the other. Two creatures who shared a love for motorcycles naturally spoke the same language.”

″‘This is interesting-very interesting-something quite new. Give me the Bird’s A.B.C first-slowly now.’ So that was the way the Doctor came to know that animals had a language of their own and could talk to one another.”

“Her fits of passion, which are awful to behold, and are usually called teething, are no such thing; they are her natural exasperation, because we don’t understand her, though she is talking an intelligible language. She is talking fairy.”

″‘...animals don’t always speak with their mouths,’ said the parrot in a high voice, raising her eyebrows. ‘They talk with their ears, with their feet, with their tails- with everything.‘”

“Terrific? What sort of word is that? Don’t you bring language like that into this cave!”

“Why did the English language have so few words for green? Every leaf and every tree had its own shade of green. Another example of how far Nature was still ahead of humans. ”

“‘I don’t know,’ her mother said. ‘I don’t talk Creole.’ She gazed at her daughter’s wet buttocks. ‘And neither do you.’”

“Roma said Cai like a foreign merchant, his mouth pulled wide. The Chinese and the Russians shared the same sound for Cai: tsai, like the sound of a match being struck. His butchering was intentional, an observation of the situation.”

“There’s this word in Japanese: tsundoku,” Neil says suddenly. “It’s my favorite word in any language.” “What does it mean?” He grins. “It means acquiring more books than you could ever realistically read.”

“The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.”

“That is not English, Will. And when we speak to one another, you and I, we do not use English. We use the Old Speech. We were born with it in our tongues. You think you are speaking English now, because your common sense tells you it is the only language you understand, but if your family were to hear you they would hear only gibberish. The same with that book.”

“Well, science and religion are not competitors, they’re two different languages trying to tell the same story. There’s room in this world for both.”

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.”

She notices that his Spanish is different from hers, and asks if he is from “the other side.”

“When she was a baby, I tried to talk to Laleh in Farsi too. But I never really got the hang of it, and Mom’s friends kept correcting me, so after a while I kind of gave up. After that, me and Dad talked to Laleh exclusively in English. That left the two of us in the dark whenever we were at gatherings with Mom’s friends. That was the only time Dad and I were on the same team.”

“Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.”

“Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key.”

“I fell in love with the organization, the way language- the pure truth in the words- was nonnegotiable.”

“There’s no other word like it. The state of being infatuated with another person.”

“There’s this expression in French. Être bien dans sa peau. To feel good in your own skin.”

“Dogs can never speak the language of humans, and humans can never speak the language of dogs. But many dogs can understand almost every word humans say, while humans seldom learn to recognize more than half a dozen barks, if that.”

“Thank Gott, we Germans believe in sentiment, and keep ourselves young mit it.”

“But, Ellen,” cried she, staring fixed in astonishment, “how dare he speak so to me? Mustn’t he be made to do as I ask him? You wicked creature, I shall tell papa what you said.—Now, then!”

“Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.”

“I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers.”