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Quotations on Language 536 Quotes Found I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath. Suddenly I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get. I was really scared. I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk. For three days, I couldn't answer the phone. And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation. A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically. Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies. Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt. It is wrong to use equal language for unequal actions. As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again. I lived in England to learn English. When I went to England for the first time, it was like being on the Moon. I had no friends, I couldn't speak the language. I was very isolated. No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language. We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life. Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged. I think it is a mistake to identify a movie according to its language, as if movies were literature. From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us. I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand. In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech. Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors. The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated! Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. The finest command of language is often shown by saying nothing. Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language. Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really. I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre. Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive. Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery. Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter. Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence. No language is rude that can boast polite writers. Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand. Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language. Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing. Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas. One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man. There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language. Writers let themselves be enticed by the language. Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out. No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event. Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world. Now, mark it. This may be strong language, but heed it. The people mean it, and, my friends of the Eastern Democracy, we bid farewell when you do that thing. Whoever realizes that the six senses aren't real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas. My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc. Certainly, because the computer and computer language was still not as common as it is today. That's one of the reasons I believe Tron wasn't as popular back then as it is today. We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense. There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them. Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves. Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks. Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
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