2,489 Quotes About Language

There are certain words that have such a pleasing consistency, texture, taste, colour, odour, network, milieu, stance, poise, arch, crane, comfort, peak, trough; limpid, tepid, torpid, torqued, liquid, lacquered, honeyed, latched, thatched, throstle-sunged, spangled words. The normal pH of these words is between 3.8 and 4.5, so there is some bite to them.

We can make our language duller; we cannot make it less metaphorical. We can make the pictures more prosaic; we cannot be less pictorial.

If we dig even deeper to the roots of words, we unearth physical metaphors for still more abstract concepts.

A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language.

Words begin as description. They are prismatic, vehicles of hidden, deeper shades of thought. You can hold them up at different angles until the light bursts through in an unexpected color.

Our beautiful language has gifted us with sch a multitude of words,” Xiulan said. “What better way to glorify them than with their use?

We know, we feel that everything has been said, that there is nothing left to say. But we feel less that this truth affords language a strange, even unsettling status which redeems it. Words are ultimately saved because they have ceased living.

Though they're my currency, words are often a frustratingly inadequate tool; language a hopelessly flawed instrument. Some things can never truly be articulated.

A poet if anything must be a poet and far more than just a writer of words. The poet is the storyteller, the shaman, the jester and the rogue. The poet lives in the world of language and imagination, love, death & obsession and yet still sees the universe in the smallest of everyday things that we merely take for granted.