872 quotes found
“Never invite someone who is speaking a foreign language in your presence to "Go back to your country." The only time that phrase is every acceptable is if you are British and you are speaking to Ma...”
“All language is an aspiration to music.”
“When two lovers discover a language of their own.”
“This is the Southland burr, the only distinctive regional accent in the country. It's a soft appealing noise, deriving, I presume, from the Sottish settlers, but resembling no known Scottish accent...”
“Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.”
“The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.”
“[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.”
“Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.”
“Hey dawg, wassup?" he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as pec...”
“Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.”
“Learn to say please and thank you in multiple languages.”
“Language is the light of the mind.”
“The tongue of man is a twisty thing.”
“Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my heada very ...”
“If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad l...”
“How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”
“Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.”
“Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.”
“That one of historys greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.”
“If language had been the creation, not of poetry, but of logic, we should only have one.”
