Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 – February 19, 1952) Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness. A word can be transformed into a color, …
Grace Paley On Language
Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 - August 22, 2007) My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.
William Godwin On Multiple Languages
William Godwin (March 3, 1756–April 7, 1836) He that is acquainted with only one language, will probably always remain in some degree the slave of language… But the man who is competent to and exercised in the comparison of languages, has attained to his proper elevation. Language is not his master, but he is the …
William Godwin On Language
William Godwin (March 3, 1756–April 7, 1836) Words are of the utmost importance to human understanding. Almost all the ideas employed by us in matters of reasoning have been acquired by words. In our most retired contemplations we think for the most part in words; and upon recollection can in most cases easily tell in …
Edward Hall On Language
Edward T Hall (May 16, 1914 – July 20, 2009) The paradox of culture is that language, the system most frequently used to describe culture, is by nature poorly adapted to this difficult task. It is too linear, not comprehensive enough, too slow, too limited, too constrained, too unnatural, too much a product of its …
Rebecca Solnit On Lies And Language
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that …
Niels Bohr On Language And Religion
Niels Bohr (October 7, 1885–November 18, 1962) We ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, …
Jeanette Winterson On Language
Jeanette Winterson (August 27, 1959 -) For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them …
Stanley Kunitz On Language
Stanley Kunitz (July 29, 1905– May 14, 2006) I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy dictionary on my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word like eleemosynary or phantasmagoria - some word that, on the tongue, sounded great to me, and …
