2,489 Quotes About Language

Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.

We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.

No new world without a new language.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Isn't language amazing? I can't get over it. Sometimes you can just say things and its like a bomb that blows all your clothes off and suddenly there you are naked. I don't know if its disgusting or beautiful.

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.

I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all.

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.