2,489 Quotes About Language

Je crois que traduire est la façon la plus profonde, la plus intime de lire quelque chose. Une traduction est une magnifique rencontre dynamique entre deux langues, deux textes, deux écrivains. Elle implique un dédoublement, un renouveau.

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

An idiolect. That’s what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He’s been too blithe, he’d forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.

The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language.Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word.

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

A good story or a book is all about it's power to hold it's readers still till the very last word of it's climax - complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!

The internet is like everything that came before it, but so much more. More powerful than the greatest words ever written or spoken in any language, more powerful than any image or symbol ever seen, more powerful than hope or fear, more powerful than religion, faith itself, the totality of the human spirit. The invisible infinite that rules over our lives whether we want it to or not. But really, who doesn’t? Everyone wants a master, everyone needs some version of God.

Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speak by something outside himself-like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.