Quotes about Language

Words kill, words give life; they're either poison or fruit-you choose.

There is nothing quite as destructive to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the use of language that dismisses the way Jesus talks and prays and takes up instead the rhetoric of smiling salesmanship or vicious invective.

Writing to explore and discover what I didn't know. Writing as a way of entering into language and letting language enter me, words connecting with words and creating what had previously been inarticulate or unnoticed or hidden. Writing as a way of paying attention. Writing as an act of prayer.

Teaching resurrects dead words so they live again.

We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.

It's your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words.

It is the very nature of language to form rather than inform. When language is personal, which it is at its best, it reveals; and revelation is always formative - we don't know more, we become more. Our best users of language, poets and lovers and children and saints, use words to make - make intimacies, make character, make beauty, make goodness, make truth.

Also, I think having a musicality about me that helps in identifying different things in languages and getting them right.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.

Politics, which really is about the art of expression, ought to be a logical profession for writers (it's very hard to explain to politics- and policy-addicted people that language is the basis of all ideas - if you can't say it, you can't think it), instead of a refuge for lawyers and apparatchiks.

A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.