LANGUAGE QUOTES II
quotations about language
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
ITALO CALVINO
The Uses of Literature: Essays
In the commerce of language use only coin of gold and silver.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
attributed, Day's Collacon
A language, like a species, when extinct, never ... reappears.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Origin of Species
Problems in general are often well posed in terms of language and language remains a handy tool for explaining them. But the actual process of thinking--in any discipline--is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived--a sort of milepost--so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
"The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?", Nautilus, April 20, 2017
Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his style; a man of vigorous powers makes his style bend to his conceptions.
WILLIAM BENTON CLULOW
Aphorisms and Reflections: A Miscellany of Thought and Opinion
Language is what stops the heart exploding.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2008
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
TONI MORRISON
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1993
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
T. S. ELIOT
Four Quartets
Writers rejuvenate themselves by fleeing to foreign tongues. They escape all the psychic associations that gather around a language and a literary tradition. In a sense, it's an extreme cure for writer's block. They learn to write again, in a different register. And in the process of adopting a new language, their relationship with the old one changes. It grows less familiar, less tired; with time and distance, the native language can take on the freshness and freedom of the foreign language, with all of its associated possibilities for experimentation.
E. W.
"Why do writers abandon their native language?", The Economist, March 14, 2016
Language is fossil poetry.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquest.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
"Biographia Literaria", The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Prose and Verse
The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages -- a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Humour, Its Theory and Technique
A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
This is the strange contract between life and language: language keeps naming and life, like a woman seductively escaping her seducer's caress, keeps just a little beyond its names.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Consider: you're inventing language and you come on an object for the first time, so you name it 'tree.' Then you go on and you find another object. You have the choice of calling it tree-only-with-special-properties, such as squat, hard, gray, leafless, and branchless, for instance -- or you can name it a completely different object, say: 'rock.' And then the next object you encounter you may decide is a 'big rock,' or a 'boulder,' or a 'bush,' or 'a small, squat tree,' and so on. Now two languages will not only have different words for the same things, but they will end up having divided those same things up into categories and properties along completely different lines. And that division, as much or more than the different words themselves, will naturally mold all the thinking of the people who use that language.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Neveryon
The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person's existence.
GAO XINGJIAN
"An Interview with Gao Xingjian", BookBrowse
Language is an integral part of our lives, it is an essence of our culture. But it is also power. If you don't speak the language of the land, you are at the mercy of those who do.
NATALIE SHOBANA AMBROSE
"On Pointe -- Limits of my language", The Sun Daily, March 30, 2016
Language ... isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
One must not consider a language as a product dead, and formed but once; it is an animate being, and ever creative. Human thought elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence; and of this thought language is a manifestation. An idiom cannot therefore remain stationary; it walks, it develops, it grows up, it fortifies itself, it becomes old, and it reaches decrepitude.
WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT
attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds: Selections from the Writings of the Most Celebrated Authors from the Earliest to the Present Time
Thought is not language. Thought is not based on language. Thought does not depend on language; language is not a condition for thought. There is no essential connection between language and thinking except in two senses: that language is a translating device for the imperfect expression of thought or of the awareness of experience; and without thinking humans could not produce language.
AMOREY GETHIN
Language and Thought: A Rational Enquiry Into Their Nature and Relationship