“Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.”
“لا توجد أي دولة في العالم انطلقت في المجال التكنولوجي دون الاعتماد على اللغة الأم.”
“Yes, of course, there s something fishy about describing people s feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It s really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like pass the gravy is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.”
“When a man is in love how can he use old words? Should a woman desiring her lover lie down with grammarians and linguists? I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love s adjectives into a suitcase and fled from all languages.”
“With every fragment of rock that fall from me, I can hear the voice of Marianne Engle. I love you. Aishiteru. Ego amo te. Ti amo. Eg elska pig. Ich liebe dich. It is moving across time, coming to me in every language of the world, and it sounds like pure love.”
“S mimasen, Alyss said repeatedly as they brushed against passerby. What does that mean? Will asked as they reached a stretch of street bare of any other pedestrians. He was impressed by Alyss s grasp of the local language. It means pardon me, Alyss replied, but then a shadow of doubt crossed her face. At least, I hope it does. Maybe I m saying you have the manners of a fat, rancid sow.”
“The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.”
“No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”
“I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.”
“To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer, she whispered then, a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.”
“If you cannot understand my argument, and declare It s Greek to me , you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is farther to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool s paradise -why, be that as it may, the more fool you , for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.”
“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
“Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.”
“Don t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there s no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won t be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
“A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.”
“We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”
“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. ”