872 quotes found
“Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life.”
“It happens all too often - people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.”
“It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of 'the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement cou...”
“Having words opened up a world of possibilities for Martha.”
“Words are such fun!”
“If two thousand five hundred languages are to be lost in the course of the twenty-first century, dont be in any doubt about what that means for us: in each of those two thousand five hundreds cases...”
“Words for completely novel concepts and technical breakthroughs are devised as soon as needed, explained with ease and absorbed with scarcely an effort by all who need them. This ability to innovat...”
“English is only a weak second language, so that the third language--which at the moment is getting the most play, since French is what I speak, read, and hear almost 24/7--is trying to take over th...”
“Language itself is a major resource in the naming of what cannot be named”
“The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecti...”
“We can only think in a language that we master.”
“Your language indicatesand limitswhat you think.”
“Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conce...”
“I did not foresee my words becoming such a reverie of mimic and refrain.”
“No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally he...”
“Weber sandstone a billion years old. This rock was Precambrian, I read, a term like postmodern, suggesting that what it names is so mysterious as to require identification by what it isnt.”
“...hear the language, this English, double-jointed as Bedivere's limbs. It only sounds awkward. In its ability to join one concept to another as with pegs, its dependent clauses, figures of speech ...”
“Language has infinite power and as long as theres Romeo and Juliet or Laila and Majnu or You and Me, as long as theres love in the world, language will find a way to cast its spell.”
“The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.”
“Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone.”
