Language Quotes - Page 51

Like a diaphanous nightgown, language both hides and reveals.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent.

Color is a language. It is the language of painting. How painting expresses itself is in large part with color.

Liquid, flowing words are the choicest and the best, if language is regarded as music. But when it is considered as a picture, then there are rough words which are very telling, they make their mark.

To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.

The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.

I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that's more or less irrelevant. I think I'm a good reader, I'm a good reader in many languages, especially in English, since poetry came to me through the English language, initially through my father's love of Swinburn, of Tennyson, and also of Keats, Shelley and so on - not through my native tongue, not through Spanish. It came to me as a kind of spell. I didn't understand it, but I felt it.

If you love language, it will love you back.

Language changes very fast.

You couldn't have human society without language.

When I go to photograph somebody, they say, "What do you want me to do?" Those are the most frightening words in the English language. I want to say, "Please, go over into good light and do something unusual.

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.

All of us, just because we are able to talk, also believe we are able to talk about language.

["Faggot"] is a great word! The whole thing about language is, it's supposed to be broadcasting your intentions. These are my intentions and these words broadcast my feelings. If all of a sudden you have forbidden words that doesn't make the intent any better. It's just appeasing sensitive people.

I wish that I spoke more languages. I speak a couple languages, but not well enough to really dub myself. French is really the only one, and it's a difficult thing.

If you ask me, music is the language of memory

How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.

Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds.

Our vision is every book ever printed in any language [fetched and viewable on our eBook Kindle device] in under 60 seconds.

Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.

Painting is... a richer language than words... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.