2,489 Quotes About Language

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.

What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship.

Su idioma eran las texturas y los ecos, el color de las voces, el ritmo de los pasos.

The facts that make the world real-- these depend on the unreal in order to be recognised by it.

I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.

L’argot n’est autre chose qu’un vestiaire où la langue, ayant quelque mauvaise action à faire, se déguise. Elle s’y revêt de mots masques et de métaphores haillons.

He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

...he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke—the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love.