Language Quotes - Page 6

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.

The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as "snakes" or "roaches". This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that fellow humans were created in God's image.

The species greatest harvest ― words.

His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.

Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

Whatever is language is poetic language and if the word required by the poet does not exist in his known language then it is up to him to discover it.

There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.

Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid habits of language out of me so that I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the banalities of the same talk.

Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?

Let your feelings flow and the scribbled words stay as a sovereign of the moment.

The words a person reads and hears and repeats become his own, enter his verbal storehouse. When needed they become, even if he does not know it, the clothing for the thoughts to which he gives birth.

The world is so big and words are so small!

Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It's all you've got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.

Faeces by any other name would smell as gross

Progressives' don’t just redefine (and valorize) deviancy; they insist on renaming it, too.