Quotes on Language

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

One belongs to one's language as a writer.

It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 years ago, I went to Rome for the first time and felt an instant gut connection and wanted to get to know the city.

Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It's just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.

I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.

Practice self-awareness, self-evaluation, and self-improvement. If we are aware that our manners - language, behavior, and actions - are measured against our values and principles, we are able to more easily embody the philosophy, leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do.

The very special place that a language occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences.

I never felt any attraction towards violence. I never tried to express myself through violence. Violence is a language.

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

In a sense, every form of expression is imposed upon one by social factors, one's own language above all.

It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.

In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts.

There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.

The Constitution is no simple contract, not because it uses a certain amount of open-ended language, but because its language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, altogether, all at once.

I still have a feeling that I haven't written the best that I can write. I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.'

It is not our sexual preferences, the color of our skin, the language we speak, nor the religion we practice that creates friction, hatred and wars amongst in society. It is our words and the words of our leaders that can create that disparity.

Poetry is not the language we live in. It's not the language of our day-to-day errand-running and obligation-fulfilling, not the language with which we are asked to justify ourselves to the outside world. It certainly isn't the language to which commercial value has been assigned.

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.