Quotes about Language

For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communication of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses around a bright red cave), and addressed themselves the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart.

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

And for some reason she held the sentence suspended without meaning in her mind's ear, "…quite enough for everybody at present," she repeated. After all the foreign languages she had been hearing, it sounded to her pure English. What a lovely language, she thought, saying over to herself again the common place words…

"Our armies swore terribly in Flanders," cried my uncle Toby—"but nothing to this."

[H]is gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered.

Tongue; well that's a wery good thing when it an't a woman's.

conventional phrases are a sort of fireworks, easily let off, and liable to take a great variety of shapes and colours not at all suggested by their original form.

Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.

It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standards that implies).

Black men don't like to be called 'boys,' but women accept being called 'girls.'

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.