LANGUAGE QUOTES II
quotations about language
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The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
ITALO CALVINO
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The Uses of Literature: Essays
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Language is what stops the heart exploding.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2008
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Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his style; a man of vigorous powers makes his style bend to his conceptions.
WILLIAM BENTON CLULOW
Aphorisms and Reflections: A Miscellany of Thought and Opinion
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Writers rejuvenate themselves by fleeing to foreign tongues. They escape all the psychic associations that gather around a language and a literary tradition. In a sense, it's an extreme cure for writer's block. They learn to write again, in a different register. And in the process of adopting a new language, their relationship with the old one changes. It grows less familiar, less tired; with time and distance, the native language can take on the freshness and freedom of the foreign language, with all of its associated possibilities for experimentation.
E. W.
"Why do writers abandon their native language?", The Economist, March 14, 2016
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The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages -- a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Humour, Its Theory and Technique
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In the commerce of language use only coin of gold and silver.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
attributed, Day's Collacon
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Problems in general are often well posed in terms of language and language remains a handy tool for explaining them. But the actual process of thinking--in any discipline--is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived--a sort of milepost--so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
"The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?", Nautilus, April 20, 2017
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Language is fossil poetry.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
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A language, like a species, when extinct, never ... reappears.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Origin of Species
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For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
T. S. ELIOT
Four Quartets
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Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
TONI MORRISON
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1993
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Thought is not language. Thought is not based on language. Thought does not depend on language; language is not a condition for thought. There is no essential connection between language and thinking except in two senses: that language is a translating device for the imperfect expression of thought or of the awareness of experience; and without thinking humans could not produce language.
AMOREY GETHIN
Language and Thought: A Rational Enquiry Into Their Nature and Relationship
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At the end of the day, good language is bold language.
FRANCESCO CLEMENTE
"Pamela Love and Francesco Clemente Reflect on Decades of Collaboration", Vogue, April 4, 2016
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The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step.
LEONARD BLOOMFIELD
Language
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We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
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The sole constitutional office of language being to express our ideas and sentiments, it becomes more and more perfect and useful, the more effectually it subserves this sole end of its creation.
ORSON SQUIRE FOWLER
Memory and Intellectual Improvement
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The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Morning Yet on Creation Day
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It is a silly conceit, that men without languages are often without understanding; it is apparent in all ages, that some such have been even prodigies for ability; for it is not to be believed that wisdom speaks only to her disciples in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
THOMAS FULLER
attributed, Day's Collacon
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Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquest.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
"Biographia Literaria", The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Prose and Verse
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Learning a language is the making of shared semantic agreements with others.
PHIL BAINES & ANDREW HASLAM
Type and Typography
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