Language Quotes - Page 17

Sports just happen to be excellent for avoiding foreign-language stage fright and developing lasting friendships while still sounding like Tarzan.

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.

If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that it's understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above.

The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.

The power of language – it can heal and build, or corrupt, poison, destroy, desecrate, annihilate…

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

When the heart is down and the soul is heavy, the eyes can only speak the language of tears

It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.

A rumor is usually a lie that the media can legally profit from.

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences.

Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.)

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another.