Quotes about language

On the poor use of grammar It's a matter of usage. If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It's our syntax that's limiting.

"How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words."

There is no imagination in fetishlike sexual conformity; and no ques­tions are being asked in political discourse on sex about hope and sorrow, intimacy and anguish, communion and loss. Imagination is both aggressive and delicate, a mode of cogni­tion unmatched in its ability to reveal the hidden meanings in reality now and the likely shape of tomorrow. Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which is only—patheti­cally—a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possi­bility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses. The paring down of the vocabulary of human affect to fuck-related expletives suggests that one destroys the com­plexity of human response by destroying the language that communicates its existence.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or men who love living.

The medium here is not the message, quite the opposite: the very medium that we use—the universal intersubjectivity of language—undermines the message.

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

Loonies speak their own language, like educated people.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another—language was just there to hide their thoughts. (p. 319)

Going Up in the World is a metaphor, which I am learning about, it is like Lying but more decorative. (p. 153)

The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication. (p. 146)

The English language was created by poets, a five-hundred year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest dialogue in world literature. French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.