2,489 Quotes About Language

How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else's words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance.

In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

Irony is a linguistic trust fall.

By teaching us how to read, they had taught us how to get away.

Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech.

difference, distance, absence and seperation lie 'at the heart' of meaning, being and reality

Hoe krijg je intimiteit in taal? Hoe wordt de roman die ook een film is toch weer een roman met alle typisch romanachtige kanten ervan? En hoe krijg je léven in die roman? Er moet een relatie zijn tussen taal en het andere; de wereld van vlees en bloed daarbuiten. Die laatste kant had ik misschien te weinig ontwikkeld. Ik word tegenwoordig soms zo overvallen door de gekste emoties, of liever gezegd: door verlangen naar die emoties.

Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.

All cultures and peoples turn to poetry during times of celebration, transformation and challenge—those times when ordinary language cannot carry meaning beyond our understanding.