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Language Quotes

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Language Quotes

“We are like dogs, cats, cows, rats ... What separates us from them and from the remaining matches against mammals is negligible. To have the same diseases. Rats spread plague like us, but we are just as contagious as them. And the dogs get diabetes, like we do, and get cancer, like us. And age, like us. And die, like us. Why then the biblical claim that man is the king of creation? Perhaps because only man has developed spoken language, the words, wherein lies its prodigious ability to lie.”

MenAgeLyingDiesLanguageAbilityDogCreationKingsDiseaseCatClaimsCancerSpreadCowsBiblicalRatsPlagueContagiousDiabetesMammalsProdigiousSpoken Language
Author:Fernando Vallejo
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“So while you're getting ripped apart head to toe as you fall into a black hole, you will also extrude through the fabric of space and time, like toothpaste squeezed through a tube. To all the words in the English language that describe ways to die (e.g., homicide, suicide, electrocution, suffocation, starvation) we add the term spaghettification.”

WayScienceDiesFallLanguageBlackTermSpaceSuicideAddHolesFabricToesTime And SpaceEnglish LanguageStarvationTubesRippedBlack HoleHomicideToothpaste
Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.”

ArtWholeFormLawPoetryOrderLiteratureLanguageExistenceBreakDefinitionsGenreManifestationOppositionRepresentationDiscourseAdaptedAffirming
Book:The Order of Things
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“Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.”

PeopleArtTwoMomentsRealityPoetryReadingLanguageForceCreationPoetReturnReaderUniqueOriginalsGravityParticipationOpposingElevationRecitation
Book:The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History
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“In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.”

GivingPoetryCertainLiteratureLanguageVirtueEffectsPoetPersonalityGiving UpOrdinaryCurrentsLocalsUncertaintyNonsenseCropsCritiqueColorfulJuxtapositionClose Calls
Book:Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry
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“It is the role of the artistic coder to question the coding languages, both through self-reflection and by using them for unintended purposes. These coders introduce multiplicity where none existed and challenge definitions of intent for the entire environment of programming language, machine and system.”

SelfPoetryPurposeLiteratureLanguageChallengesRolesEnvironmentReflectionMachinesDefinitionsArtisticProgrammingIntroducingSelf ReflectionProgramming LanguagesMultiplicityCoders
Author:Stephanie Strickland
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“This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give to the reader; and in doing so they turn language against its own project of conceptual division, and use it to heal itself - and in the process - paradoxically - to articulate new concepts that it can't yet accommodate.”

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Author:Don Paterson
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“I tell ya, if I hadn't chosen the career of being a performer, I think linguistics would have been a natural area that I'd have loved - to teach it, probably, Language has always fascinated me. There's a genetic inheritance there a good language gene, which I inherited [from my mother and grandfather] and she fostered that in me as he fostered that in her.”

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Author:George Carlin
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“In language at once stark and delicate, Suki Kim shatters the polemic of North and South Korea. She couples an investigative reporter's fierce desire to strip away the fiction of the Hermit Kingdom with an immigrant's insatiable hunger for an emotional home, no matter how troubled and no matter how impossible.”

MatterHomeDesireLanguageFictionImpossibleEmotionalCoupleSouthHungerKingdomsImmigrantsDelicateFierceReportersKoreaStarksInsatiableKimHermitsSouth KoreaNorth And SouthPolemicsInsatiable Hunger
Author:Monique Truong
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“The language we're exchanging, the fillings in our teeth, the pavement on the road outside, everywhere you look, for better or for worse, you're going to see evidence that accepting reality is not a human's tendency, and not what we're good at, and not, in my speculation, what God or Natural Selection hired us to do. We've been hired, by this universe, to dream, to aspire, to make things that weren't real real - and because that involves a lot of failure, we're damn good at doing that, too.”

HumansLooksRealDreamRealityUniverseLanguageNaturalAcceptingEvidenceTeethTendenciesDamnAspireSelectionSpeculationFillingNatural SelectionPavementExchangingAccepting RealityDamn GoodFilling In
Author:Dan Harmon
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“Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.”

TryingFirstsTwoPlayScienceLanguageIgnoranceFirst TimeEuropePhilosophicalPhilosopherTheatreDespiteFormerLatterMachineryVisitingTheatricalAstronomers
Author:Arthur Schopenhauer
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