Language Quotes - Page 67

It was once argued that 'Starring Sylvester Stallone' were the three scariest words in the English language but until I saw Adam Sandler I'd always thought the three scariest words in the English language were 'starring Dan Aykroyd.'

I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself.

There is nothing more nervous than a million dollars - it moves very fast, and it doesn't speak any language.

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

Art is no longer anything more than a kind of meta-language for banality.

For someone like you who's a British citizen this might seem strange. How can you ban a language? It turns out that you can. During the dictatorship it was illegal to speak Catalan. This is an experience that we Catalans have all had to varying extents. Some more tense than others, but it's something we all share.

My response to my friend Naheed Nenshi was simply to say that some of the hyperbolic language that's being used to critique this sensible reinforcement of the public nature of the citizenship oath is, I think, unhelpful, and is actually inflaming the situation.

For me, myth is the 'common' language of us all.

I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.

Praise is the symbol which represents sympathy, and which the mind insensibly substitutes for its recollection and language.

An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.

Language does not make one an elite.

The poet is a master of language, the schizophrenic is a slave to it.

A whipper-snapper of criticism who quoted dead languages to hide his ignorance of life.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

All German women are beautiful. It's not for nothing that we talk of the German "Fräuleinwunder." You don't get this word in any other language.

Money is a miraculous thing. It is your personal energy reduced to a portable form and endowed with power you yourself do not possess. It can go where you cannot go; speak languages you cannot speak; lift burdens you cannot touch with your fingers; save lives with which you cannot deal directly.

I never thought of that one, that linguistics could be driving cultural things. There are some thoughts that that does happen in humans, that languages have different characteristics and that influences in some ways how different groups behave, and I suppose it might in whales.

Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented.

Art is a wholly physical language whose words are all the visible objects.

A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.