quotations about language
The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009
Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
STANLEY FISH
How to Write a Sentence
I like you; your eyes are full of language.
ANNE SEXTON
letter to Anne Clarke, Jul. 3, 1964
Languages, like our bodies, are in a perpetual flux, and stand in need of recruits to supply those words that are continually falling out through disuse.
HENRY FELTON
A dissertation on reading the classics and forming a just style
You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest
Language is a mirror of the mind.
J. CORNWELL
attributed, Day's Collacon
A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors.
LERA BORODITSKY
"How Language Shapes Thought", Scientific American, Feb. 2011
The unaffected language of real feeling and benevolence is easily understood, and is never ridiculous.
MARIA EDGEWORTH
Angelina
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.
ELIZABETH KOSTOVA
The Historian
Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.
NELSON MANDELA
Long Walk to Freedom
In the acquisition of languages by direct study, where time can be afforded for the purpose, it is found that several languages, belonging to the same family--as the Latin, Italian, and Spanish, for instance--can be acquired together, almost as easily and rapidly, as either of them can be acquired separately, and with far less chance of their being lost from the memory of disuse. By finding the roots in the parent tongue, and by tracing the growth from these roots outward into different tongues, as it were genealogically, it is found that they descend and spread according to certain organic laws of modification and growth.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
JANE WAGNER
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
The power of language lies in combining meaningless sounds into words that in turn are combined into phrases. Research on the communication systems of non-human primates and birds suggests that the ability to combine meaningless vocal elements has evolved repeatedly, but the evolution of syntax (i.e. combining different words to form more complex expressions) was so far considered to be unique to human language.
DAVID WHEATCROFT
"Syntax is not unique to human language", Eureka Alert!, March 8, 2016
Language provides a crucial means of reinforcing cultural and political hegemony. English in America and elsewhere is a linguistic placeholder for colonialism: an invasive species that stood the test of time.
JORDAN MACKENZIE
"English is not the American national language", The Independent Florida Alligator, March 8, 2016
Without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?
MELINA MARCHETTA
Finnikin of the Rock
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Letters and Social Aims
The selective instinct of the artist tells him when his language should be homely, and when it should be more elevated; and it is precisely in the imperceptible blending of the plain with the ornate that a great writer is distinguished. He uses the simplest phrases without triviality, and the grandest without a suggestion of grandiloquence.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Principles of Success in Literature
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
JACK GILBERT
"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart"
I don't speak ... I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune Messiah