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Language Quotes

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Language Quotes

“Poetry is a second translation of the soul's feeling; it must be rendered into thought, and thought must change its nebulous robe of semi-wording into definite language, before it reaches another heart. Music is a first translation of feeling, needing no second, but entering the heart direct.”

FirstsHeartSoulFeelingsLanguageMusic IsDirectPoetry IsDefiniteEnteringTranslationsRobesWording
Book:Golden Thoughts from the Life and Works of Frances Ridley Havergal ...
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“Some feminist critics debate whether we take our meaning and sense of self from language and in that process become phallocentric ourselves, or if there is a use of language that is, or can be, feminine. Some, like myself, think that language is itself neither male nor female; it is creatively expansive enough to be of use to those who have the wit and art to wrest from it their own significance. Even the dread patriarchs have not found a way to 'own' language any more than they have found a way to 'own' earth (though many seem to believe that both are possible).”

IfsThinkingWayBelieveArtSelfEnoughUseSeemsEarthFoundLanguageProcessFemaleCriticsMalesFeministWitDebateSignificanceFeminineDreadSense Of SelfUse Of Language
Book:Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-busting Border-crossing Loose Canons
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“Be ever gentle with the children God has given you; watch over them constantly; reprove them earnestly, but not in anger. In the forcible language of Scripture, "Be not bitter against them." "Yes, they are good boys," I once heard a kind father say. "I talk to them very much, but do not like to beat my, children--the world will beat them." It was a beautiful thought not elegantly expressed.”

WorldKindChildrenBeautifulFatherLanguageGivenBoysWatchesHeardBeatsScriptureBitterGentleMy ChildrenGood BoyBeautiful Thoughts
Author:Elihu Burritt
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“The world of public discourse - political, social, diplomatic, commercial - has so corrupted language that we are rightly more suspicious of the meaning of words than we are convinced of their veracity. Language has been turned on its head.”

WorldHas BeensPoliticalLanguageSocialConvincedDiscourseSuspiciousDiplomaticVeracityPublic DiscourseMeanings Of Words
Book:Writing for Your Life: Discovering the Story of Your Life's Jou
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“when Christian theology becomes traditionalism and men fail to hold and use it as they do a living language, it becomes an obstacle, not a help to religious conviction. To the greatest of the early Fathers and the great scholastics theology was a language which, like all language, had a grammar and a vocabulary from the past, but which they used to express all the knowledge and experience of their own time as well.”

MenWellsHelpingUseChristianPastUsedReligionFatherLanguageReligiousFailingConvictionObstaclesTheologyVocabularyGrammarKnowledge And ExperienceChristian TheologyScholastics
Author:Lily Dougall
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“In I Praise My Destroyer, Diane Ackerman demonstrates once again her love for the specific language that rises from the juncture of self and the natural world, and her skillful use of that language. Whether she turns her attention to the act of eating an apricot 'the color of shame and dawn,' or to 'the omnipotence of light,' or to grief when 'All the greens of summer have blown apart,' her linking of unique images, her energetic wit and whimsy, her compassionate investment in life, always bring new pleasures and perceptions to the reader.”

WorldSelfUseLightTurnsLanguageNaturalPleasureGriefAttentionColorReaderPerceptionEatingSummerUniquePraiseShameInvestmentWitDawnCompassionateNatural WorldEnergeticSkillfulDestroyersOmnipotenceWhimsyJunctureApricots
Author:Pattiann Rogers
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“There are some words I find impossibly difficult ... 'Love,' 'feeling' and especially 'happiness' are at the head of the list. This is not because I haven't experienced any of them but because whenever I think about using the words I don't really know what anyone means by them. I'd find it easier to sit down and write a book about each (coming, obviously, to no conclusion) than to use them casually in speech or writing.”

ThinkingKnowsWritingMeanBookUseFeelingsLanguageDifficultHavensEasierSpeechDown AndListsConclusionLove Feeling
Author:Jenny Diski
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“The trees change their voices in autumn as well as their shapes. No longer do they whisper to one another in muffled tones as they did in summer; they talk in a different leaf-language now. The wind moves through the boughs like fingers drawn across the strings of a harp filling the air with the harsh dry sound of sapless leaves. It is the main theme of the autumn music, this murmuring counterpoint of dead leaves.”

WellsDifferentMovingLanguageSoundVoiceAirTreeWindShapesSummerFingersToneThemeDryAutumnStringsHarshLeafsFillingHarpsMurmuring
Book:The Glory of the Garden
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“I try to write each piece in the language of the piece, so that I'm not using the same language from piece to piece. I may be using ten or twenty languages. That multiplicity of language and the use of words is African in tradition. And black writers have definitely taken that up and taken it in. It's like speaking in tongues. It may sound like gibberish to somebody, but you know it's a tongue of some kind. Black people have this. We have the ability as a race to speak in tongues, to dream in tongues, to love in tongues.”

PeopleKnowsWritingTryingKindMayUseDreamSpeakLanguageSoundBlackAbilityRaceTakenPiecesTenTraditionTwentiesTongueBlack PeopleMultiplicitySpeaking In Tongues
Author:Alexis De Veaux
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“Time in China has no immediacy as in America. Here I find the swift passage of our few earthly years accepted as naturally as the fall of flower and leaf. ... I hear and speak a language in which grammar has no tense. Both scholars and illiterates, in ordinary daily speech, tell an event of centuries ago as casually as an incident of the hour. Only as my knowledge has accumulated have I been able to know whether something related happened just then or in some past dynasty.”

KnowsYearsAbleAmericaPastTimeFallSpeakLanguageHoursHappenedCenturyEventsFlowerSpeechOrdinaryChinaAcceptedRelatedPassagesScholarLeafsGrammarIncidentsTenseDynastyImmediacy
Author:Nora Waln
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“Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitised language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children.”

MenYearsChildrenWarBodyMotherHouseLanguageWifeSceneHusbandSmartStrikesVideoDespiteBombsMinistryBurnedWeepingDefenceDescribingPentagonMother ChildCratersWife Mother
Author:Marie Colvin
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“the way in which a faith community shapes language about God implicity represents what it takes to be the highest good, the profoundest truth, the most appealing beauty. ... While officially it is rightly and consistently said that God is spirit and so beyond identification with either male or female sex, yet the daily language of preaching, worship, catechesis, and instruction conveys a different message: God is male, or at least more like a man than a woman, or at least more fittingly addressed as male than as female.”

MenWaySaidDifferentGodSpiritLanguageSexCommunityShapesWorshipMessagesHighestFemaleMalesInstructionConsistentlyPreachingIdentificationFaith Community
Author:Elizabeth A. Johnson
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“As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.”

WorldHumansHelpingFeelingsPoetryLanguageLinesSituationImaginePerspectiveHonorNewsToolsDirectMetaphorDetailsMeaningfulGenuinePoetry IsImageryHeadlines
Author:Naomi Shihab Nye
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“They say that there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that in what concerns them everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened.”

FirstsHas BeensRealityLanguageGivenPrinciplesShapesConcernStartingRegulationVocabularyUpside DownBasic Principles
Book:Les Guerilleres
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“Chloe Honum's brilliant first book The Tulip-Flame traces an identity forming within radically divergent but interlocking systems: a family traumatized by the mother's suicide, a failed relationship, the practice of ballet, a garden-each strict, exacting. And with 'a crow's sky-knowing mind,' Honum in every case transfigures emotion by way of elegant language and formal restraint. Chloe Honum is 'one astounding flame' of a poet, and I predict a long-lasting one.”

WayMindFirstsLongBookMotherLanguageEmotionPracticeCasesKnowingSkyIdentityPoetGardenSuicideBrilliantFlamesLastingBalletFormalStrictRestraintElegantCrowDivergentChloeLong LastingFailed Relationship
Author:Claudia Emerson
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“One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.”

WellsDoeMadeSaidTwoRealityLanguageCommonWrittenObjectsPoetPerspectiveReaderHonorDemandUniqueSignificantTwo ThingsValidityPoetry By Famous PoetsUnique Perspective
Author:W. H. Auden
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