872 quotes found
“You all right?" he said again.I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deser...”
“The polyglot is a linguistic nomad.”
“Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.”
“I want you to learn right at the outset not to play with the spoon before you take the medicine. Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. Procrastina...”
“The nature of poemsIs a matter of words and deedsAn intimate encounter of voiceIn the ache of the heartIn the labor of breathingA hesitant casting of eyesAway from the mundane to seeThat delicate a...”
“Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the no...”
“You cant turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.”
“The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.”
“I like the way he says we and am amazed, as I often am by language as power, at the way a simple pronoun can upend a relationship.”
“Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people a...”
“Man acts as though he were the sharper and the master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”
“In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental ...”
“The stars have their own language, you know. If you're careful, you can learn it.”
“Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for pleasure derived from the misfortune of others? Schadenfreude.”
“Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, es...”
“Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear lan...”
“Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.”
“Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun - all those exciting verbs that don't come unit the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.”
“The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.”
“The language of nature is silence.”
