2,489 Quotes About Language

For the horrors of the American Negro's life there has been almost no language.... And, in fact, the truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

I began to understand that poetry did not have to be ... of an English that was always lonesome for its homeland in Europe.

We went from French to a sort of hybrid of the Catalan and Castilian that he taught me, and I wonder if that's part of the reason I don't miss him, that everything we ever said to each other was in languages I'm starting to forget.

How do you write about what can’t be written about? I try to bend language until it can suggest the ineffable, the great gap between what we think we know, and what we don’t know. The felt but not expressed. The intuited but not understood.

As old horses go to the knacker's yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.

Thought of a person is like his soulWhere his body is the dress of his soulAnd language is the dress of his thought. - Mirror Thoughts

One of the sneakiest ways these biases show up is that in our language, in our culture, maleness is seen as the default

Medicine, when it fails to cure, busies itself with changing the sense of verbs and pronouns.

I ask this question a lot—Does that make sense?—usually to my family, because I appreciate clarity and assume others do as well... we just assume other people understand what we are talking about. That we are, as the idiom goes, on the same wavelength. In my experience, we are not.