Language Quotes (page 64)
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Dorian Gray frowned and turned his head away. He could not help liking the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him. His romantic, olive-coloured face and worn expression interested him. There was something in his low languid voice that was absolutely fascinating. His cool, white, flowerlike hands, even, had a curious charm. They moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their own. But he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid.
Oscar Wilde
I understood the therapists were trying to rebuild Paul's vocabulary, beginning wit the rudiments, but Paul found it taxing, boring, and disturbingly condescending. His loss of language didn't mean he was any less a grown-up with adult feelings, experiences, worries, and problems. [p. 144]
Diane Ackerman
The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.
John Ciardi
I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language
Stephen Fry
All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are...
Paul Valery
...that language may be a compound code, and that the discovery of an enormous complexity beneath a simple surface may well be more dismaying than delightful. E.g.: the maze of termite tunnels in your joist, the intricate cancer in her perfect breast, the psychopathology of everyday life, the Auschwitz in an anthill casually DDT'd by a child, the rage of atoms in a drop of ink - in short, anything examined curiously enough.
John Barth
The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty. That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or forest, by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and watery depths; all these have vanished; They live no longer in the faith of reason; But still the heart doth need a language; still. Doth the old instinct bring back the old names; Spirits or gods that used to share this earth. With man as with their friend; and at this...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge