2,489 Quotes About Language

My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a 'car crash of of cliché' is itself a cliché.

And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.

Had art indeed depended on experience as much as the critical profession wants us to believe, we'd have far more – and far better – art on our hands than we do. A poet is always the product of his – that is, his nation's – language, to which living experiences are what logs are to fire

Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. Everyone equal. No one higher or lower than anyone else. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person.

Language is a palette for sharing experience, it is the thing you carry with you.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Everyone reacted differently to being spoken to in a language they didn't understand. Katya got quiet and scared. Ivan leaned forward with an amused expression. Grisha narrowed his eyes and nodded in a manner suggesting the dawn of comprehension. Boris, a bearded doctoral student, rifled guiltily through his notes like someone having a nightmare that he was already supposed to speak Russian.

I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.

What I feel for you is at once the expression of language and the absence of it.