When he spoke of love, it was in the manner of someone who can recite a phrase in a foreign language but has no idea what it means. He only knows that it sounds pretty.
The citizens of Ludania would finally be free, no longer forced into a class system that determined what language they could speak, what jobs they could do, or who they could be
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.
He'd shot and beaten people because he couldn't talk to them.Violence was the only language nobody could understand. There were no translators.
Then the movie started. It was in a foreign language and had subtitles, which was fun because I had never read a movie before.
To most people, if you’re muttering, you might as well be speaking a foreign language. I should know, because in college I took two years of muttering.
In this town to know three languages is an unnecessary luxury. It's not even a luxury, but a sort of unnecessary addition, like a sixth finger. We have a great deal of superfluous knowledge.
I picked up a new language a few months ago. It was just laying on the ground, dirty, so I scooped it up and popped it in my mouth.
The embrace was long and tight, but more like a complex language then a simple prolonged act. She said nothing at all, but damn she said everything. And I finally got it.
Simplicity is no longer presented as a virtue. The value of complex and difficult language has been preached with such insistence that the public has begun to believe the lack of clarity must be a sign of artistic talent.
Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.
Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?
You can take and nail two sticks together like they've never been nailed together before and some fool will buy it.
Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.
Attempting to contain the infinite within finite symbolism of language may result in scholarship, but it will not produce devotion. (110)
I still have a feeling that I haven't written the best that I can write. I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.
Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.
Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.
Attempting to build a language wall around Quebec is precisely the wrong policy to follow. It will keep out of Quebec exactly what we need to attract by way of talent and capital; it will drive our best - francophones as well as allophones and anglop...
It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.
The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.
