872 quotes found
“There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.”
“Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentenceThis account of you we have from all quarters received. A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteo...”
“You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.”
“Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.”
“Nobody knows everythingone of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learnand everybody makes mistakes.”
“So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.”
“Toxemia. A word that starts so harsh and ends so gently.”
“The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.”
“Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns...”
“Well... "why" is a hard question to answer in any language.”
“She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours o...”
“Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also ...”
“Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You dont believe me? Get with the program, crackpot!”
“Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solem...”
“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...”
“The creation of language is the creation of a fiction. The minute we speak we are in that fiction. Its a fiction designed, we hope, to reveal a truth. There is no pure language. The only pure langu...”
“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. Its the v...”
“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.”
“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....”
“Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain.”
