872 quotes found
“One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least.”
“If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is o...”
“She spoke with the usual cadences of the young: sentences curling upward at the end, all statements fading into a smoky, implied question mark, as though nothing could be said with any reasonable c...”
“The strange word nymphomation, used to denote a complex mathematical procedure where numbers, rather than being added together or multiplied or whatever, were actually allowed to breed with each ot...”
“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and contentit must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble, and from babble to ...”
“Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use...”
“A native tongue, in my opinion, isn't the language spoken where you were born or the first language you learned; it's a language that makes you feel at home. It's a language that you don't command,...”
“Boondocks' is simply the Tagalog word for mountains.”
“To abandon language is to stop/creating a place other than your own life/in which to live. It is to enter/the terrible certainty of the flesh. Even god/is only possible through language.”
“So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smug...”
“Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with l...”
“Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade before the public. ”
“You can't see other's point of view when you have only one language.”
“He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.”
“It was impossible to quarrel with words, whose tremulous inequality showed indisposition so plainly.”
“It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled alway...”
“The Balti had as many names for rock as the Inuit have for snow.”
“Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that's true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same - even if they don't...”
“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 its clearness, the shadowy thi...”
“[Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studieswith the result that they know more about devoting care...”
