Language Quotes - Page 2

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

I can’t write anymore. My words are paper airplanes tenuously gliding towards the dust. The wonder of the Phoenicians, which throughout the latter part of this entry I have not fully comprehended, is getting vaguer still. Where did this feather in my hand come from? Am I Icarus?

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.

Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.
It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:
The history of how you felt.

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the 'poetess'.

Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Language has not the power to speak what love indites
The soul lies buried in the Ink that writes

If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life.

Is there a better method of departure by night
than this quiet bon voyage with an open book,
the sole companion who has come to see you off,

to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?