When did the word 'compromise' get compromised? When did the negative connotations of 'He was caught in a compromising position' or 'She compromised her ethics' replace the positive connotations of...

Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language.

Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and...

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm {opposition}, there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict {the choice of one term against another}, and...

I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked – Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both {only the techies came in English}.

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

A metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression {a form of words} used for artistic or rhetorical purposes; instead, it is a process of human understanding by which we achieve meaningful experience...

Words, with their multiple meanings and nuances are like trees and oral communication like a forest. Trees are good for hiding, forest for losing the path. When one is trying to contemplate the...

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

Words are immortal - Elinor

Probably is a word with an emergency ejector seat.

Names are strange and special gifts. There are names you give to yourself and names you show to the world, names that stay for a short while and names that remain with you forever, names that come...

I suggested, further, that the following might be sculpted: a large box filled with sixty moonshine jugs - - piled high, toppling over, corks popping, liquor flowing. Disorder to match the clutter and...

I don't speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.

Then you should say what you mean, the March Hare went on.I do, Alice hastily replied; at least-at least I mean what I say-that's the same thing, you know.Not the same thing a bit! said the Hatter....

My mother's journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth. Without a shadow there is no substance. If we have no shadow,...

Otaku {おた} is also a formal way of saying "you". た means "house", and with the honorific お, it literally means "your honorable house", implying that you are less of a person and more of a...

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find...

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it...

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

, she said in response to Hernandez's soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas,...

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. {Seriously, how could anyone who...

There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.

When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive.

In American, when I was young, my parents always seemed to be in mourning for something. Now I understand: it must have been the language.