2,489 Quotes About Language

All I could see was a meaningless arrangement of squiggles and dots, symbols and patterns, running on endlessly. Words are such unstable things.

Dictionaries are the record of how people are already using the language, not providers of words for us to start using.

Sad and mad and love are such weak words, drawn long ago from Germanic languages spoken by people who may have been more stone than flesh. The soul needs words rooted in romance languages, words like despondent and ravished and adore.

The point wasn't that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters' preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters "he", it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

Some people are story collectors. While others collect seashells, or stuffed animals, or stamps, story collectors wrap themselves in words, surround themselves with sentences, and play with participle, even those pesky, perky dangling ones. They climb over Cs and mount Ms and lounge in Ls. Soon enough they land in the land of homonyms, then, wham! They stumble into onomatopoeia, that lovely creaking, booming bit of wordplay - and that, Dear Friend, is where our story begins.

Dolores seems to dwell only just inside language, she makes sentences the way a potter works clay, squashing them any which way into shapes that please her.

Puns are at their core defined by multiplicity of meaning, not necessarily humor. The common expectation that puns should always be funny, or die in the attempt, is a relatively modern development.

Few subjects are inherently dull: language is where dullness or liveliness resides.

The hardest thing is the words, how long it takes, he says, taking a sip of his drink, the concentration you need to work out what goes with what, how to put together a single sentence. I had no idea that shaping a sentence was so difficult, all the possible ways there are to do i, even the simplest sentence, as soon as it's written down, all the hesitations, all the problems. (Mickey Mantle describing writing his memoir.)