Quotes on Language

...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.

It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did we come from, what happens next?' The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

We have a president for whom English is a second language. He's like 'We have to get rid of dictators,' but he's pretty much one himself.

The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.