Language Quotes (page 63)

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• chance
• little
• cans

If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue. Bell Hooks

• kids
• wishes
• giving

I wish wish I could steal the intricacies of language. But give my kids a break—remember, most of them were fed on Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Azar Nafisi

• women
• life
• study

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature? both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of... Shirley Hazzard

• culture
• world
• cultures

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. Frantz Fanon

• hand
• future
• world

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world? Jeanette Winterson

• understanding
• always
• should

One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least. Voltaire

• philosophy
• languages
• task

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein

• god
• history
• lesson

One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages. Will Durant

• seductive
• past
• country

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten. Jan Morris

• fly
• gestures
• makes

To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly. Helene Cixous

• lively
• our
• pay

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives. Joyce Carol Oates

• mercy
• screamed
• mercies

Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four. Terry Prachett

• dream
• world
• play

He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Patti Smith

• friend
• friends
• soul

When we lift our inward eyes to gaze upon God we are sure to meet friendly eyes gazing back at us, for it is written that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout all the earth. The sweet language of experience is "Thou God seest me." When the eyes of the soul looking out meet the eyes of God looking in, heaven has begun right here on this earth. Aiden Wilson Tozer

• eyes
• lies
• knowledge

The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies George Orwell