We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate people of who...
Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However the words in a great poet's phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly spe...
Now (obviously) a sentence’s truth—even when we hold the sentence’s meaning fixed—depends on which world we are considering. “Brown is Prime Minister” is true in the actual world but, since Brown need not have been Prime Minister, there a...
After I nodded, she continued. “We can no longer express with words our emotional states, our revelations, our transformations. Words fail. We are in the very beginning stages of what might take years or even decades of transition. The human race i...
It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and ...
There is a single truth, it filters through different stories and languages because people come from different cultures and speak different languages. And this truth has manifested itself through millennia, in multiple ways. Different people belong t...
As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases—doublethink, thought police, 'Some animals are more equal than others'—that he embedded in our language and in our minds. In Orwell's own min...
The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses ‘the means at hand,’ that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for wh...
It is the link between satisfaction and redress--the idea that a satisfaction scene, whatever else it is, is a revenge tragedy--that I want to pursue; and the sense that we waylay our desire--make it literally unreal--with pictures of its satisfactio...
To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.
My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.
Getting too interested in the English way of life won't help you land a permanent job.
The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad.
Are there any more beautiful words in the English dictionary than 'see you tomorrow?
But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.
I’ll write the first sentence in English and the second sentence will be nonsense translated to Russian, to make the ultimate non sequitur.
I love English rock music the best and have always been fascinated by The Clash, especially Joe Strummer, their singer.
an English girl might well believe that time is how you spend your love.
Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
At first the English were very surprised by our disregarding the Hague Convention. But from 1916 onward they used at least as much poison as we did.
