872 quotes found
“Most of the people who have verbally asserted that ‘there is no master of pronounciation’ have intentionally made a claim and unintentionally made their claim believable. (It is ‘pro-nun-ciation’ n...”
“Holding the lamb in his arms, Jesus watched the people file past, some coming, some going, some carrying animals to be sacrificed, some returning without them, looking joyful and exclaiming, Allelu...”
“All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the ...”
“You are the language so universalyou are forgottenBe my linguistTurn meinto your words.”
“Many people just think they understand English, remember.”
“He said it twice because he had never said it before, and it sounded funny.”
“Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes...”
“The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant. Shishtvanyanov: a gnashing and spluttering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can't understand the actual words, but we sense the c...”
“remember that misuse of language can lead to miscommunication, and that miscommunication leads to everything that has ever happened in the whole of the world”
“I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.”
“Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.”
“He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must of been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composer...”
“it had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that ot...”
“You don’t need to be a poet, a performer, a writer, or a journalist to tell your story powerfully. You do, however, need to elevate your language in ways that will bring your story to life clearly ...”
“The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.”
“Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as "light," "sound," "stars," "music"—word...”
“Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This 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 uncour...”
“You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.”
“Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.”
“So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.”
