Language Quotes - Page 37

• The Ojibways have great respect for the Bear. According to their legends, in the distant past the Bear had a human form and was in fact an ancestor of the Ojibways. Therefore he understands the Indian language and will never attack or fight any Indian if he is addressed properly.

  Norval Morrisseau

  Fighting, Past, Legends

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• For me, French is so rich and so sacred that learning it is like learning a foreign language.

  Fabrice Luchini

  Sacred, Rich, Foreign Language

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• Archaeological materials are not mute. They speak their own language. And they need to be used for the great source they are to help unravel the spirituality of those of our ancestors who predate the Indo-Europeans by many thousands of years.

  Marija Gimbutas

  Years, Needs, Helping

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• Evangelicalism is like my religious mother tongue. I revert to it whenever I’m angry or excited or surrounded by other people who understand what I’m saying. And it’s the language in which I most often hear God’s voice on the rare occasion that it rises above the noise.

  Rachel Held Evans

  Mother, Religious, Voice

  Rachel Held Evans (2012). “A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband 'Master'”, p.18, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• One of the reasons why language is so sick right now and cliché-ridden and lame and boring and laid-out, and about to go to sleep, is because there aren't a thousand Tom Clarks. If I were writing a prescription right now, you know, if I had my shiny thing here, a stethoscope around my neck, that's the prescription I'd write. Take one thousand Tom Clarks before going to bed.

  Edward Dorn

  Sleep, Writing, Sick

  Edward Dorn, Joseph Richey (2007). “Ed Dorn Live: Lectures, Interviews, and Outtakes”, p.41, University of Michigan Press

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• The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater, and is closer to music. It’s abstract but still narrative. Everything feels less rehearsed. It’s more experimental than classical.

  Emmanuel Lubezki

  Narrative, Film, Abstract

  "Immersed in Movies: Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki Climbs ‘The Tree of Life’" by Bill Desowitz, www.indiewire.com. February 10, 2012.

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• I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That's what they have every day.

  Xiaolu Guo

  Pain, Thinking, Poison

  "A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers". Book by Xiaolu Guo, 2007.

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• Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

  Damon Galgut

  Measurement, Moments, Habit

  Damon Galgut (2011). “The Impostor”, p.36, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I grew up speaking both languages, and for me that's really important.

  Jon Secada

  Important, Grew Up, Grew

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• I grew up in a community that was bilingual. I've done it for a while, singing in both languages.

  Jon Secada

  Sight, Community, Singing

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• Because powerful images are fixed in the mind more readily than words, the photographer needs no interpreter. A photograph means the same thing all over the world and no translator is required. Photography is truly a universal language, transcending all boundaries of race, politics and nationality.

  Arthur Rothstein

  Photography, Powerful, Mean

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• The Wars is a great book, rich in its images, its language, its construction, and, ultimately, its conception.

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  War, Book, Rich

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• Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.

  Etel Adnan

  Art, Expression, Color

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• If you don’t have at least a working knowledge of the Hawaiian language… you can’t chant well. You cannot… receive the images of poetry paints for you. It’s like having peas and no pod.

  Keali'i Reichel

  Hawaii, Paint, Peas

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• The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.

  Paul Celan

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• I don't know anyone who has described that terrible yearning for ecstasy and immolation through music as lucidly as Sean Madigan Hoen in Songs Only You Know. Only a thorough initiate of the scene who also had some genius with language could summon the demotic yet electric voice for the job. If there is ruefulness, now, for the way he treated his body, his girlfriends, and his family, he wisely reprises in his book, in neon detail, the fever that once placed him in the same drunken boat with Iggy Pop, Rimbaud and Artaud.

  Jaimy Gordon

  Song, Girlfriend, Jobs

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• Even in a crowded field, it is a rare pleasure to come across a prose stylist like Kellie Wells, whose intellect and language bid one another beautifully to a dance. She dares to be at play in the most unsettling questions of her day. Surely when the present generation of writers shakes down to its unique and irreplaceable voices, Kellie Wells will be one of them.

  Jaimy Gordon

  Unique, Play, Voice

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• They have our bundles split open in museums / our dresses & shirts at auctions / our languages on tape / our stories in locked rare book libraries / our dances on film / The only part of us they can't steal / is what we know.

  Chrystos

  Book, Museums, Library

  Chrystos (1988). “Not vanishing”, Press Gang Pub

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• The angels in heaven covered their eyes with their hands and sobbed loudly, because that is what they always do when a man hits his wife. A profound sadness settled over the earth...God was silent in every language. The angels tried to dry their tears, but their handkerchiefs were so soaked through that is started raining even in the deserts.

  Guus Kuijer

  Rain, Sadness, Eye

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• I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Book, Giving, Thrill

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2001). “Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books”, p.5, Beacon Press

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• Andy Brown is one of our most interesting and exciting younger poets. With its love of ideas and language, his work demonstrates that there need be no barriers in poetry; that the philosophical, the lyrical and the playful can be combined in work of assured and generous vision.

  John Burnside

  Philosophical, Ideas, Interesting

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• I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose.

  Sol Stein

  Book, Writing, Tired

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• What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?

  John Vaillant

  Whales, Answers, Lions

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• I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.

  Kenneth Branagh

  Mean, Fire, Way

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them.

  Kenneth Branagh

  Mysterious Things, Actors, Goes On

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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