All Quotes

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.
‐‐ Jhumpa Lahiri

Language and words for psychopaths are only word deep; there is no emotional colouring behind it. A psychopath can use a word like, 'I love you' but it means nothing more to him than if he said, 'I'll have a cup of coffee.'
‐‐ Robert D. Hare

Language and written language are the only real way we have to see inside another person's thoughts and to know what makes another person human. Without writing, we just wouldn't have that kind of access.
‐‐ Carol Windley

Language as a communication tool is the primary element from which literature is created. Even in pre-literate societies, it exists as songs, riddles, or epics that are chanted.
‐‐ F. Sionil Jose

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
‐‐ George Steiner

Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it.
‐‐ Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

Language cares.
‐‐ Howard Nemerov

Language changes very fast.
‐‐ John Maynard Smith

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.
‐‐ Alan Moore

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.
‐‐ Gregory Bateson

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.
‐‐ Sarah Hall

Language does not make one an elite.
‐‐ Irrfan Khan

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
‐‐ Rita Mae Brown

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.
‐‐ Elie Wiesel

Language for me narrates the pictures in my mind.
‐‐ Temple Grandin

Language for me narrates the pictures in my mind. When I work on designing livestock equipment I can test run that equipment in my head like 3-D virtual reality. In fact, when I was in college I used to think that everybody was able to do that.
‐‐ Temple Grandin

Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.
‐‐ Paul Tillich

Language has historically stood as a barrier for some voters seeking to participate in the electoral process.
‐‐ Eric Schneiderman

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.
‐‐ David Crystal

Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
‐‐ Terry Eagleton

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.
‐‐ Jhumpa Lahiri

Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.
‐‐ Michael Cunningham

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
‐‐ Gustave Flaubert

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.
‐‐ Claude Levi-Strauss

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.
‐‐ Gilbert Highet

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
‐‐ Elizabeth Bowen

Language is a more recent technology. Your body language, your eyes, your energy will come through to your audience before you even start speaking.
‐‐ Peter Guber

Language is a nice way to remember things.
‐‐ Erin McKean

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
‐‐ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
‐‐ Noam Chomsky

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
‐‐ Roland Barthes

Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.
‐‐ Kenneth L. Pike

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.
‐‐ Noam Chomsky

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.
‐‐ Steven Pinker

Language is always burdened by thought.
‐‐ Terrance Hayes

Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools.
‐‐ Erik Qualman

Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
‐‐ Russell Hoban

Language is an inadequate form of communication. If you've picked up an instrument, it's because you don't feel you are communicating sufficiently.
‐‐ Stephen Stills

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.
‐‐ Alice Walker

Language is froth on the surface of thought.
‐‐ John McCarthy

Language is fun; it's fun to try.
‐‐ Lars Mikkelsen

Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words and are communicated - and understood - without conscious thought.
‐‐ Leonard Mlodinow

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
‐‐ Roland Barthes

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
‐‐ George Santayana

Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.
‐‐ Holly Near

Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it.
‐‐ Orhan Pamuk

Language is memory and metaphor.
‐‐ Storm Jameson

Language is much closer to film than painting is.
‐‐ Sergei Eisenstein

Language is my bugbear. Everyone says things now like 'I was sat' instead of 'I was sitting', which just sounds so ugly.
‐‐ Penelope Keith