Language Quotes - Page 15

Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.

Language is the alchemy of transforming a thought into a word, and the word into a new reality.

Language is the art of experience

Language is a social art.

Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)

I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.

Language has created a barrier that prevents us from seeing existence as it truly is.

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.

In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.

...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

My Japanese isn’t much better today, but at least now I appreciate my duality more than when I was a punk kid.

Marriage converts a player into a polygamist.

Mr Hawkins said nothing; the Hawkins' domestic affairs were arranged upon the principle that Fanny supplied the talk and he the silence.

...there are no sweeter words in the English language (or any other) than husband and wife.

Language ... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.

To Alef, the letter
that begins the alphabets
of both Arabic and Hebrew-
two Semitic languages,
sisters for centuries.

May we find the language
that takes us
to the only home there is -
one another's hearts.

...

Alef knows
That a thread
Of a story
Stitches together
A wound.

Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.