Language Quotes

"For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice."

T.S. Eliot

"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."

Patrick Rothfuss

"The past is always tense, the future perfect."

Zadie Smith

"silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation."

Rumi

"I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me."

Matt Groening

"Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words."

Rumi

"It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me."

Stephen Fry

"You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect."

John Green

"I often fantasize about torturing some of the lazier letters of the alphabet, like C, U, and E, because together they only manage to accomplish as much as the solitary letter Q."

Jarod Kintz

"The menu is not the meal."

Alan W. Watts

"Our love went from fly to flower to butterfly, and it was meant to beautifully flutter, not sit still on a shelf like a trophy to be collected."

Jarod Kintz

"I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language."

Muriel Barbery

"String several words together in a sentence and you have a language necklace. My I love you would look great with your favorite red dress."

Jarod Kintz

"The middle finger is a great body language tool for letting people know you’re upset. Poetry isn’t quite as effective in a fit of road rage."

Jarod Kintz

"The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes."

Courtney Love

"I’ll write the first sentence in English and the second sentence will be nonsense translated to Russian, to make the ultimate non sequitur."

Jarod Kintz

"Spelling Bees are useless and unnecessary competitions. Before Microsoft Word and Google, Spelling Bees had value, but now they are all superflewus."

Jarod Kintz

"I think I’m mouth blind and that’s why all food tastes bland. The only things that have any flavor are the words I love you."

Jarod Kintz

"I’ve only been in love one time, I said as I held up my pinky finger. I could have held up my index finger, but I wasn’t in love that long."

Jarod Kintz

"The word very will vary in muchiness. I love you very much, and that won’t vary from day to day."

Jarod Kintz

"What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written."

Jacques Derrida

"Better than learning how to speak a foreign language, is to start speaking the truth. But few people will listen, because they just don’t understand."

Jarod Kintz

"If my favorite three letters are X, Z, and Q, then my favorite word is Xazaqazax. It means “a lover of love."

Jarod Kintz

"My definition of dictionary can’t be found in the dictionary. Dictionary—A linguistic prison, confining words to well-defined cells, with little chance of parole."

Jarod Kintz

"Instead of sidewalks, why not sideruns? After all, the pace of life is faster than it has ever been, so I think our infrastructure’s nomenclature should reflect that."

Jarod Kintz

"Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty."

Muriel Barbery

"The word long is short, and so is the word short, but why is the word love as long as long? Shouldn’t it be longer?"

Jarod Kintz

"Ink is drinkable and printable. The words “I love you” don’t take up much space, but they can quench your thirst forever."

Jarod Kintz

"I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance."

Stephen Fry

"We sit and talk,quietly, with long lapses of silenceand I am aware of the streamthat has no language, coursingbeneath the quiet heaven ofyour eyeswhich has no speech"

William Carlos Williams

"How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul."

Frances Hodgson Burnett

"All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess."

Marcel Duchamp

"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself."

Henry David Thoreau

"Language is the key to the heart of people."

Ahmed Deedat

"He said "cool"like I say a Spanish word when I'm not sure of the pronunciation."

Kelley Armstrong

"Me neither,” Shane put in. “Homie don’t play that.”“I wonder, sometimes, if your generation speaks English at all,” Amelie said."

Rachel Caine

"Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality."

Karl Lagerfeld

"Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all."

Winston S. Churchill

"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

"Coin a new word and hear it jingle in your pocket with all your other change. My love for you is sofacouchsitsitting, so you’d better buckle up."

Jarod Kintz

"His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul."

J.M. Coetzee

"لا توجد أي دولة في العالم انطلقت في المجال التكنولوجي دون الاعتماد على اللغة الأم."

المهدي المنجرة

"It's only words... unless they're true."

David Mamet

"when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world."

George Steiner

"We live in a world where unfortunately the distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by manipulation of facts, by exploitation of uncritical minds, and by the pollution of the language."

Arne Tiselius

"I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?"

Rene Denfeld

"Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word."

Julio Cortázar

"What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!"

Gustave Flaubert

"Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise."

Jeanette Winterson

"Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives"

Alfred de Musset

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Language Quotes | QOTD