Best 3547 quotes in «language quotes» category

I've tried to use sex in place of language, but no one yet has been capable of processing the imagery, references, and metaphors I imbue into my thrusts, so I've returned to common English.

I want all the books on the shelves. I want the books with dinosaur words like nigger that show the skeletons in our national closet. I want books with the word cunt as well as the word kike. Words don't scare me. Suppressing them does.

I wanted to say a certain thing to a certain man, a certain true thing that had crept into my head. I opened my head, at the place provided, and proceeded to pronounce the true thing that lay languishing there—that is, proceeded to propel that trueness, that felicitous trularity, from its place inside my head out into world life. The certain man stood waiting to receive it. His face reflected an eager accepting-ness. Everything was right. I propelled, using my mind, my mouth, all my muscles. I propelled. I propelled and propelled. I felt trularity inside my head moving slowly through the passage provided (stained like the caves of Lascaux with garlic, antihistamines, Berloiz, a history, a history) toward its debut on the world stage. Past my teeth, with their little brown sweaters knitted of gin and cigar smoke, toward its leap to critical scrutiny. Past my lips, with their tendency to flake away in cold weather—

I want to hear you wound my lovely language with your rough barbarian tongue.

I want you to learn right at the outset not to play with the spoon before you take the medicine. Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. Procrastination is the longest word in the language, but there’s only one letter between its ends when they occupy their proper places in the alphabet.

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest.

I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for me or you. Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages. In any new language, there should only be we.

I was born with my voice in my hands.

I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happiness was defined by upwardly mobile consumerism, Kerouac etched a different existence and he wrote in an original language.

I was not born with English in my pocket.

I was pretty good at picking up new languages when I was little, but it's not like I had superpowers or anything. Kids just have an easier time with words.

I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.

I will treat language with resigned delight, embrace it like unrequited love, offer words to you with a kind of secret shame, for I know that sometimes there is such a thing as too much language, and that language can hold a kind of sincerity that is tiresome and overwrought.

I wish I didn’t need words to speak to her. They sometimes hold very different meanings for us both.

Living in Supreme Influence, your language is neutral and/or moving toward your vision rather than moving away. In other words, you speak about what you do want, not about what you don't want.

Literary translation is not merely an act of picking words from one language and keeping it by dipping in the vessel of another language. Those words need to be rinsed, washed, carved and decorated as much as possible.

Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a child then, so I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.

Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don’t believe me? Get with the program, crackpot!

Long hours spent in the study of any text will reveal inner, unseen contours, an abstract architecture. This is as true of sacred books as of those poems written in pursuit of courtly or earthly love, or even of language itself. The ancient Mosaic law had accommodated this insight to the disadvantage of the surface layer, of images, while the Roman Catholic Church, akin to the preliterate cultural forms from which it in part arose, allows for the existence of a mystical understanding and experience of these abstractions. The careful scholar cannot but help but become aware of the conflict: when one speaks of the word, or Word, what is one truly speaking of? Who is the architect, man, and---or---a---God? Attempts to apprehend this new reality, these tensions, went initially by the names of philosophy, theology, science. What is it to know deeply? Is knowledge not always a form of power that, taken too far, cannot be turned against itself?

London is a language. I guess all places are.

Looking at what 'foreplay' is, 'sexual intercourse' is a game.

ll our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters" from other tongues and cultures.

Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.

Loose and forbear!

Louisa was left to wonder how grown men found the smallest words the most difficult ones to say. “Thanks,” “please,” “sorry”… From the way their tongues tripped over the syllables, you’d think those words were Latin names for species of exotic fungi. When it came to “love,” some of them lost the power of speech altogether.

Love for others is the foundation of leadership. Simplicity is the language of leadership. Authenticity is the true character of leadership.

Love had to be deeper than that, than a glance over tea, which was indicative but not dispositive.

Love is the secret language of the heart which everyone can understand.

Love is a universal language.

Love is the universal language.

Love is not one language, it is many. you don't have to be fluent in them all, just a commitment that you'll always be willing to learn.

Love is the essence of life, Love is the universal language of all creation, Love is the eternal desire, Love is the life's flower with fragrance to share, So feel the longing for love and being beloved.

Love’s language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.

Love speaks in flowers. Truth requires thorns.

Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He shows his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. It wasn't something learnt, I suspected, from the guys before me who'd picked him up and fucked him and fucked him around. It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him. It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go.

Madness is like being primitive once again and going back to the ancient era when there was no language, no clothes to wear, no ready-made food to eat, no cozy shelter to take rest in and no future to plan about. Only the ‘present’ was present with a struggle to survive. But, the only difference between a ‘primitive man’ and a ‘mad man’ is that the former had a ‘reasonable’ mind with some unreasonable traits and the latter has an ‘unreasonable’ mind with many unreasonable and possibly some reasonable traits!

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought, experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptual values developed expressly to subordinate women. Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name. No transcendence of the male system is possible as long as men have the power of naming... As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect.

Mainittakoon lyhyesti, että kiroilussa suomalainen on tasapainon vaalija, siis keskitien kulkija. Sillä siinä missä romaanisten kielten puhuja keskittyy toisia tai itseään häväistääkseen genitaalialueeseen ja germaani pysyttelee tiukasti anaalilinjalla, suomlainen hallitsee sekä uloste- että genitaalirekisterin ja rikastaa sadatteluaan vielä perkeleen tai itsensä saatanan kaltaisella demonikuvastolla. Tämän herkän kielen rumin ilmaus on naisen sukuelintä tarkoittava diabolinen manaus.

Mal nommer un objet, c'est ajouter au malheur de ce monde. Et justement la grande misère humaine qui a longtemps poursuivi [Brice] Parain et qui lui a inspiré des accents si émouvants, c'est le mensonge. Sans savoir ou sans dire encore comment cela est possible, il sait que la grande tâche de l'homme est de ne pas servir le mensonge. ["Sur une philosophie de l'expression", Poésie 44, 1944]

Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given.

Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience. This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.

Many people just think they understand English, remember.

Man acts as though he were the sharper and the master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Maureen O'Brien's Bakery Lingo: A Partial Glossary • 9 donuts - A shutout • 2 croissants - A full moon • 3 croissants - A ménage à trois • 4 bear claws - Full smokey • 2 bear claws - Half smokey • The last one of any item - The gift of the Magi • A baker's dozen of doughnut holes - a PG-13 • Anything in the unlikely quantity of 36 or a lot of something - A Wu-Tang • Blueberry muffin - Chubby Checker • Bran muffin - Warren G the regulator • Any customer who left no tip - A libertarian • Any customer who only tipped the coins from their change - A couch shaker • Any person who requested a substitution - Master and demander • Any person who requested TWO substitutions - Demander in chief • Any person who requested MORE than two substitutions - The new executive chef and finally.... • Any vegan customer - A Morrissey

Marriage converts a player into a polygamist.

[…] marginile unei cărţi nu sunt niciodată clar şi riguros trasate: dincolo de titlu, de primele rânduri şi de punctul final, mai presus de configuraţia sa internă şi de forma care îi conferă autonomie, ea se află prinsă într-un sistem de trimiteri la alte cărţi, la alte texte, la alte fraze: este un nod într-o reţea.

Maybe sometimes it feels like “What impact can I have in this world? I am only one person and most people don't understand me.” But everyone can use their voice to say their something- through whatever medium that is. There will always be someone who understands your language and appreciates your message.

Maybe that was why the French called orgasms “las petites morts”: because the things that bring us passion tend to slip past our defenses, to creep insidiously into every facet of our consciousnesses and kill us as ruthlessly, and efficiently, as any drug.

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation