872 quotes found
“There was only one huge world with no back to itA world like a sunOne day it broke into tiny piecesThey were the words of the language we now speakPieces that will never come togetherBroken mirrors...”
“Language is a metaphor for experience. Its as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memorybut we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.”
“This story, which takes place one a Sunday in July in a hot, deserted Lisbon, is the Requiem that the character I refer to as I was called on to perform in this book. Were someone to ask me why I w...”
“From time immemorial, some men supposed to deal in one-valued 'eternal verities'. We called such men 'philosophers' or 'meta-physicians'. But they seldom realized that all their 'eternal verities' ...”
“There are several important remarks which can be made about this 'absolute emptiness' and 'absolute nothingness'. First of all, we now know, theoretically and empirically, that such a thing does no...”
“I dug her usage of "Spotify" as a verb.”
“But language is malleable, and it is not always on the side of truth. This is something every writer knows. Words make and unmake the world with terrifying rapidity, and they do so without moral di...”
“If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.”
“People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.”
“I will treat language with resigned delight, embrace it like unrequited love, offer words to you with a kind of secret shame, for I know that sometimes there is such a thing as too much language, a...”
“A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.”
“before men could speak they enjoyed confounding another with signsthey enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an imageas much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave”
“For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.”
“We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and...”
“Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it wa...”
“One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones sprin...”
“Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.”
“So many people understand language, but few people understand the real meaning of language. They that understand the meaning of language understand language and life better!”
“Language is where the tongue fails itself over & over again.”
“There's a world of difference between, "Look at this mess you made!" and "I don't like to see food on the floor!”
