Quotes about Language

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.

I belong to the Russian language. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.

By writing... in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it.

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

We spoke often of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, who argued that the future of the Jewish people depended on the existence of a Jewish state, one bonded together not just by religion but by language and nationality. "Let them give us sovereignty over a piece of the earth's surface, just sufficient for the needs of our people. Then we will do the rest.

To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

In the Chinese language the word for righteousness is a combination of two characters, the figure of a lamb and a person. The lamb is on top, covering the person. Whenever God looks down at you, this is what he sees: the perfect Lamb of God covering you.