Language Quotes

“Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tight rope.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

“The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Bet and Other Stories

“Poetry is alive because it is a medium of vision and experience.
It is not necessarily comfortable.
It is not necessarily safe.”
― Lenore Kandel

“the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

“I like the word ‘evil’. Scramble it a little and you will get ‘vile’ and ‘live’. ‘Good’, on the other hand, is just a command to ‘go do’.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“Euphemisms chosen by fear are a covenant with hypocrisy and will immediately destroy the poem and eventually destroy the poet.”
― Lenore Kandel, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel

“The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city…”
― Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments

“There are so many words in our language; we get to know so few of them.”
― David Levithan, Boy Meets Boy

“Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.”
― Eduardo Galeano

“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 does – thus some religions succeed whilst others fail and become extinct. Tradition itself can never cease to exist, but the religions which are its voice perish with the rise and fall of civilizations”
― Gwendolyn Taunton, Primordial Traditions

“There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this produces a true barrier.”
― Lenore Kandel, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel

“The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.”
― Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English

“Your conversations are the beginning of your connections; be careful of your communications. Talk politely to strangers; you have no knowledge about how many of them will become your close friends forever!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Daily Drive 365

“Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it.

Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording.

The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life.”
― Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

“Whatever is language is poetic language and if the word required by the poet does not exist in his known language then it is up to him to discover it.”
― Lenore Kandel, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel

“Language is one of the more complex human cognitive functions,” Narly Golestani, Group Leader of the university’s Brain and Language Lab, tells me during a recent visit. “There’s been a lot of work on bilingualism. Interpretation goes one step beyond that because the two languages are active simultaneously. And not just in one modality, because you have perception and production at the same time. So the brain regions involved go to an extremely high level, beyond language"["In other words: inside the lives and minds of real-time translators," Mosaic, November 18, 2014].”
― Geoff Watts

“The creation of language is the creation of a fiction. The minute we speak we are in that fiction. It’s a fiction designed, we hope, to reveal a truth. There is no “pure” language. The only “pure language” is the initial sounds of a baby. All of us lose that purity, and as we get more “of” the world, we even lose sometimes the capacity to keep that breath moving in our language.”
― Anne Deavere Smith

“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 communicate. It’s the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, it’s a moment when they want to communicate very badly. They’re digging deep and projecting out at the same time.

[…]

The idea is that the psychology of people is going to live right inside those moments when their grammar falls apart and, like being in a shipwreck, they are on their own to make it all work out.”
― Anne Deavere Smith

“I take the words I can get and try to occupy them. Using the idea that my grandfather gave me — “If you say a word often enough it becomes you” — I borrow people for a moment, by borrowing their words. I borrow them for a moment to understand something about them, and to understand something about us. By “us,” I mean humans.”
― Anne Deavere Smith

“Some people use language as a mask. And some want to create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not.”
― Anne Deavere Smith

“Yet from time to time we are betrayed by language, if not in the words themselves, in the rhythm with which we deliver our words. Over time, I would learn to listen for those wonderful moments when people spoke a kind of personal music, which left a rhythmic architecture of who they were. I would be much more interested in those rhythmic architectures than in the information they might or might not reveal.”
― Anne Deavere Smith

“Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain.”
― Anne Deavere Smith

“Like language, I think any who have not acquired spirituality by a certain age are doomed to be never fluent and you are likely to mimic the one that surrounds you.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Modern nationalism swept Europe alongside the flourishing of industrialisation. Across the continent, poets and intellectuals cultivated and often heavily modified vernacular languages to be bearers of 19th century modernity. These guardians of language faced significant challenges in adapting the spoken tongues of the peasantry to the demands of high literature and natural science. The story for the arts is widely known: modern Hungarian, Czech, Italian, Hebrew, Polish and other literatures blossomed in the second half of the century. However, the high valuation for efficiency in the sciences somewhat tamed this incipient Babel ["Absolute English," Aeon, February 4, 2015].”
― Michael D. Gordin

“Language has created a barrier that prevents us from seeing existence as it truly is.”
― Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times

“Ponovo, posle mnogo godina, rečenica, i to ista, kao da se nikada ranije nije pojavila, kao da prvi put stiže sa velike udaljenosti i pokušava da kaže nešto u šta niko ionako ne veruje, a kako i da joj veruju kada između njenih odlazaka i povratka ne prođe dovoljno vremena ili, možda, naprotiv, kako neki kažu, prođe previše vremena, tako da se do kraja ne zna ko je u pravu, oni koji tvrde da tekst čita sebe ili oni koji misle da ga čita neko drugi, sve je moguće u toj rečenici, pa čak i da to ne bude ona ista rečenica, već neka koja je, ko zna kada, počela da igra ulogu prve rečenice, da se retvara da dolazi i odlazi kada to ona hoće, a sve sa jednim ciljem, koji zapravo nije još nijednom rekla, odnosno ponudila na čitanje, budući da rečenice, same za sebe, nikada ne govore, da uvek ćute, spremne da zavole nečije usne, uverene da su usne ono što njima, rečenicama, nedostaje, pa tako i ovoj rečenici, koja promiče neizgovorena i, po svemu sudeći, uopšte ne namerava da stane, već će nastaviti da se kreće, pravdajući se potragom za smislom, za jezikom, za usnama, gornjom i donjom, koje odavde liče na školjku, a odande, iz blizine, ne liče ni na šta, kao ni ova rečenica. (Rečenica)”
― David Albahari, Male priče

“Kada su Kristoferu rekli da mu je do kraja života ostala još samo jedna rečenica, on je odlučio da više ne govori, i tako je umro, ćutke, s prstom na usnama. “Kao da ga je ugušila neizrečena rečenica”, rekao je neko kasnije, na sahrani ili, možda, u crkvi, dok su čekali sveštenika. (Kraj života)”
― David Albahari, Male priče