Language Quotes - Page 80

When somebody speaks a language that we don't know, we often imagine that some important things are being said!

To speak with the shadow, you must know the language of the darkness!

There is a great beauty in every language and there is a great language in every beauty! Be silent and listen to them!

French: why does this language even exist? Everyone there speaks english anyway.

I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

The Bible is God's Word given in man's language

Socialist ideology is making France go to pot, and the French language with it.

Ancient and modern languages teem with happily expressed sentiments of more or less force and beauty, sufficiently individualized and excellent to warrant their reproduction and classification.

That choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet.

What poetry is asking us to accept can be difficult. Our proximity to our mortality, the fragility of our existence, how close we live in every moment to nameless abysses, and the way language itself is beautifully, tragically, thrillingly insufficient...these are some of the engines that drive the poem. It's natural to want to turn away from these things. But we have to face them, as best we can, at least sometimes. Poetry can help us in that nearly impossible work.

Maine election law specifies that anyone who is qualified to access the voter file must keep it confidential. And that is directory language. Making the list available is discretionary under the law.

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

Reversing a proposition rearranges its terms, but still keeps out new terms.

Language cannot say everything, fortunately.

The nature of language may determine what most people say, but I always speak my own meaning.

Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?

Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.

The best propaganda omits rather than invents

I feel my poetry has contributed through all these languages that I needed to learn leading up to English.

Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.

The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

Nobody knows everything-one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn-and everybody makes mistakes.