“... since the history of words is a mainspring of our intellectual and emotional character.”
“Language, because it is imperfect, cannot encompass experience in its raw and primal condition. To verbalize emotion and action is to decrease their impact.”
“He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they ve taken from tins and say no pleasantly.”
“The language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.”
“I should think a dead language would be rather boring, socially speaking.”
“A boy trying out a man s language.”
“I had a dream about you last night... we tried to joke but neither could make any sense. We realized that puns are present in every language, though not shared by any of them.”
“Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun - all those exciting verbs that don t come unit the end of the sentence. It s like a movie trailer for language.”
“Sometimes we speak different languages, but our hearts are the same.”
“I m online, therefore I am.”
“Faeces by any other name would smell as gross”
“The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot.”
“English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it. Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. 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 social art.”
“If Jupiter was in the ascendant when you were born, you are of a jovial disposition; and if you re not jovial but miserable and saturnine that s a disaster, because a disaster is a dis-astro, or misplaced planet. Disaster is Latin for ill-starred. The fault, as Shakespeare put it, is not in our stars; but the language is.”
“It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn t need to argue for the truth. You could see it.”
“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and apsirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.”