I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.
What you look for in the world influences what materializes. What you perceive in the people around you influences how they show up.
The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us.
To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects.
There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.
Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don't feel like it because language can make your world a better place to live.
Some people us language to describe the lives they lead, and other people use language to create the lives they lead.
There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.
People tend to criticize their spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need.
My father spoke with his hands. He was deaf. His voice was in his hands. And his hands contained his memories.
After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort...
When animals do something noble we say they are behaving ‘like humans’. When humans do something disgusting we say they are behaving ‘like animals’. Clumsy use of the English language perpetuates the myth that animals are inferior and disposa...
Sometimes I am a different character in different languages. I have different enjoyment from them. Sometimes different answers come out of me. Like, I didn't even know that about me. I get to know myself through different languages, actually.
I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between me...
Let's get into talking about how autism is similar animal behavior. The thing is I don't think in a language, and animals don't think in a language. It's sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. It's putt...
I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all pe...
What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother ton...
I’ve long believed that the gods give us the music we’re supposed to hear at the times we’re supposed to hear it, because all music, even lyrical and regardless of language performed in, is in and of itself an inherently magical language that c...
[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:] We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and e...
Sometimes with a flutter of agitated worry that felt like a beetle was trapped inside my ribs. p. 90
Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ...
