Guys get a bad rap for not wanting to talk about their feelings but maybe women are in part to blame for that. One thing that I learned from working with people where English was not their first language was this: just because they don’t speak your...
Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pas...
I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English lang...
Of all the words that exist in any language only a bare minority are pure, unadulterated, original roots. The majority are "coined" words, forms that have been in one way or another created, augmented, cut down, combined, and recombined to convey new...
Five weeks in the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth. ... Can waiting by definition slow, flash by? ... Time becomes even more elastic than usual--minutes can stretch for ages and days suddenly snap together. [p. 97]
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15]
We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.
Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had...
Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathemati...
it’s the way he uses language—which is nothing like the way fantasists used language before him. There’s no sense of nostalgia. There’s no medieval floridness. There’s no fairy tale condescension to the child reader. It’s very straight, a...
Sonny: You! Manager! Fucker! Don't get any ideas, you hear? Sheldon: Believe me, I'm on your side on this one! Sonny: Yeah, my side, shit! Sylvia: Look, there are young ladies, here. You could watch your language, you know! Sonny: I speak what I feel...
Ray: What am I gonna do, Ken? What am I gonna do? Ken: Just keep movin'. Keep on movin'. Try not to think about it. Learn a new language, maybe? Ray: Sure. I can hardly do English. [pause] Ray: That's one thing I like about Europe, though. You don't ...
If, however, we pursue what is expressed in the phrase 'the language of things', we are pointed in a similar direction. The language of things too is something to which we should pay better attention. This expression also has a kind of polemical acce...
Language is the dress of thoughts.
The language of physics is not math, but physics.
I'm not any good at foul language or anything like that.
Language does not make one an elite.
The language you are about to hear... is disturbing.
Tears are the silent language of grief.
Language is the only homeland.
Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.
