2,489 Quotes About Language

Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.("The Man Whom The Trees Loved")

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.

...it always felt good to have that moment of resolve, like saying, "I'm gonna learn French!" It doesn't matter if you do it or not, deciding is the high, right?

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.

Words are just the ashes of emotion, the residue of feeling.

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind.

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

Everything and anything we communicate to others, communicates to them, how to see us and treat us.