Dialect Quotes - Page 3

• But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family. I forgot the songs they sung - and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue; I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now - yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.

  Agnes Smedley

  Family, Song, Years

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• I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

  Ron Rash

  Writing, Different, Diaries

  "This Week in Fiction: Ron Rash" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. May 9, 2011.

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• When I was doing theater for all those years in New York, I did a lot of classical theater, wearing big corsets and big dresses and doing dialects. It's interesting that once I moved to TV, I'm playing these scrappy, contemporary toughies.

  Mireille Enos

  New York, Years, Interesting

  "Q&A – Mireille Enos (Sarah Linden)". AMC Interview, www.amc.com. April 2011.

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• When you get to speak Irish, you become more at one with yourself, you kind of have a spark when you use it, and I think it's a great dialect.

  Glenn Quinn

  Thinking, Use, Sparks

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.

  Virginia Heffernan

  Depression, Thinking, People

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• When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Here And There, Attention

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.301, Macmillan

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• But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before; though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left God not for gods, they say, but for no gods; and this has never happened before. That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, and the money, and power, and what they call life, or race, or dialect.The church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms upturned in an age which advances progressively backwards?

  T. S. Eliot

  Religious, Men, Race

  T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.144, Faber & Faber

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• But this is a story, and in a story there is always someone beautiful enough." - 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Beautiful, Girl, Two

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• Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal 'language' but many languages and dialects. There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages.

  Judith Lynne Hanna

  Dance, Language, Conventional Wisdom

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• Poetry must find ways of breaking distance.... all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds.

  Giannina Braschi

  Distance, Poetry, Way

  Giannina Braschi (1998). “Yo-yo boing!”, Latin Amer Literary Review Press

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• I am very good with dialects, but the two that I can't do for some reason are the South African and Australian.

  Liev Schreiber

  Two, Reason, Very Good

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• Mexican food is far more varied than people think. It changes like dialects. I was brought up in Jalisco by the sea on a basic diet - tomatoes, chillis, peppers of every size and rice, which is a Mexican staple. The Pacific coast has a huge array of seafood.

  Gael Garcia Bernal

  Thinking, Sea, People

  "What's in your basket, Gael García Bernal?" by Morwenna Ferrier and Dr John Briffa, www.theguardian.com. June 19, 2010.

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• You speak baby gibberish?' asked Jack. 'Fluently. The adult-education center ran a course, and I have a lot of time on my hands.' 'So what did he say?' 'I don't know.' 'I thought you said you spoke gibberish?' 'I do. But your baby doesn't. I think he's speaking either pre-toddler nonsense, a form of infact burble or an obscure dialect of gobbledygook. In any event, I can't understand a word he's saying.' 'Oh.

  Jasper Fforde

  Baby, Thinking, Hands

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• My first day on the set of 'John Adams', I was just supposed to fly to Virginia for a costume fitting. But the director figured, why not shoot it, too? So they threw me into a dress that didn't fit, gave me lines I hadn't seen, in a dialect I didn't know, and two screaming, arching infants.

  Mamie Gummer

  Virginia, Two, Directors

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• In college, I went to school for acting; we had to learn phonetics just to be able to do dialects and all that stuff. I'm somebody who does better just hearing it. I'll just imitate it, and I get it better that way. When I know too much information, I'm not great.

  Eliza Coupe

  School, College, Acting

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Communication, Care, Language

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1907). “Ponkapog papers: A sea turn, and other papers”

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• Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese.

  David Tang

  Chinese, Nine, Tone

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• I speak a little bit of Italian, yeah. I understand more than I speak. I speak more of a dialect; my mum's from Naples and my dad's from Sicily, so it comes out little a bit of a cocktail of the Italian language.

  Luke Pasqualino

  Dad, Italian, Littles

  "Discovery: Luke Pasqualino" by Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. August 12, 2012.

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• Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.

  Steven Pinker

  Character, Biblical, Editing

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.28, Penguin

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• I must confess the language of symbols is to me
  A Babylonish dialect
  Which learned chemists much affect;
  It is a party-coloured dress
  Of patch'd and piebald languages:
  'T is English cut on Greek and Latin,
  Like fustian heretofore on satin.

  Sir Richard Phillips

  Latin, Party, Learning

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• We need spies that look like their targets, CIA officers who speak the dialects terrorists use, and FBI agents who can speak to Muslim women who might be intimidated by men.

  Jane Harman

  Men, Fbi Agents, Cia Agents

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• When you use a dialect, you worry that the people you're imitating will think you're making fun of them.

  Jack Nicholson

  Fun, Thinking, People

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• I started by studying Kiswahili to learn the dialect. Then, I studied tapes, documentaries, footage, and audio cassettes of Idi Amin's speeches. And I met with his brothers, his sisters, his ministers, his generals' all kinds of people, in order to try to understand him.

  Forest Whitaker

  Brother, Order, People

  Source: aalbc.com

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• 'Particularly' is particularly difficult because the 'L' and the 'R' are totally different, like totally different letters. I would spend hours in front of the mirror with my dialect coach to observe my tongue. You don't think, when you speak, about all the things that happen in your jaw and your mouth, how everything reacts, so you have to watch all those things and realise we have a totally different use of our tongue and jaws.

  Marion Cotillard

  Thinking, Mirrors, Dialect Coach

  "Public Enemies - Marion Cotillard interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• I approach the singing kind of like with dialect thoughts in my mind. I have to sound like this on certain things to give that Frankie Valli flavor.

  John Lloyd Young

  Giving, Mind, Singing

  Source: www.npr.org

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