Language Quotes - Page 38

• I start by using Chinese and many of the sounds of other languages are similar.

  Andy Lau

  Chinese, Sound

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• I had a quick ear and could pick up languages.

  Diane Cilento

  Ears, Picks

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• Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

  Peter Straub

  Book, Self, Joy

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• The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!

  John Astin

  Appreciate, Long, Age

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

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• Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

  Harold Bloom

  Pain, Memories, Struggle

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• Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.

  Carol P. Christ

  Powerful, Subversive

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• The Divinity could be invoked as well in the English language as in the French.

  Wilfrid Laurier

  Divinity, English Language, Wells

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• I used language because I wanted to offer content that people - not necessarily art people - could understand.

  Jenny Holzer

  Art, People, Used

  Interview with Kiki Smith, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 26, 2012.

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• Let's keep our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to the Red Army. This is the only language they understand and respect.

  George S. Patton

  Army, Bayonets, Boots

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• In my mind, there's nothing wrong with it. I don't instinctively know what's wrong with it. There is a language of the ghetto. There is a language of the barrio. And it's not good. There is an attitude. There is a behavior. There is a mindset and we wouldn't anybody to be stuck in it.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Attitude, Ghetto, Mind

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• He was one of those inexplicable gifts of nature, an artist who leaps over boundaries, changes our nervous systems, creates a new language, transmits new kinds of joy to our startled senses and spirits.

  Jack Kroll

  Artist, Joy, Spirit

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• Language is the close-fitting dress of thought.

  Richard Chenevix Trench

  Inspirational, Dresses, Fitting

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• And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation.

  Kathy Acker

  Expectations, Trying, Kind

  "Kathy Acker: Where does she get off?". Interview with R.U. Sirius, io Magazine, Issue 2, www.altx.com. December 9, 1997.

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• Years should not be devoted to the acquisition of dead languages or to the study of history which, for the most part, is a detailed account of things that never occurred. It is useless to fill the individual with dates of great battles, with the births and deaths of kings. They should be taught the philosophy of history, the growth of nations, of philosophies, theories, and, above all, of the sciences.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Kings, Philosophy, Years

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• The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

  Salman Rushdie

  Freedom, Struggle, Doe

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “Is nothing sacred?”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.

  Northrop Frye

  Fundamentals, Literature, Speech

  "The Educated Imagination". Book by Northrop Frye, 1963.

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• I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

  Lionel Trilling

  States, Righteous

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• You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.

  David Antin

  Choices, Pay, Audience

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• When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

  David Antin

  Growing Up, Fluency, Kind

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• Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

  Edward Abbey

  Reality, Trying, Quotation Marks

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.13, RosettaBooks

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

  John Banville

  Real, World, Mesh

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• In fact, very few people on the face of the planet know that the very shape of the M25 forms the sigil *odegra* in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu, and means 'Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds'.

  Terry Pratchett

  Mean, People, Black

  Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett (2011). “Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch”, p.15, Harper Collins

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• I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Mother, Taken, Writing

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2014). “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien”, p.214, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Historical, Purpose, Facts

  "English and Welsh". Lecture at the University of Oxford on October 21, 1955. "The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays". Book edited by Christopher Tolkien, 1983.

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• There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the under currents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.

  John Hay

  Nature, Water, Tree

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