The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language

Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

What's in a name, anyway? That which we call a nose by any other name would still smell.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

There is, I think, humor here which does not translate well from English into sanity.

Language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where outside and inside touch.

Words are immortal - Elinor

If a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming a tapeworm.

Probably is a word with an emergency ejector seat.

At first I thought common nouns were hardest hit, coffee and doorway and so on, but it soon became clear that the missing were mostly adjectives.

Books and words not only began to have some meaning, but they meant everything.

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...

How could he possibly explain himself to these people? They wanted to learn English for show - off social reasons, or to be able to read Aldous Huxley in the original. Whereas he had learned German...

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...

Watering down the currency of expression, causing anything to mean whatever you want it to mean, until nothing is meant and nothing is precise.

Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood.

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

Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?

It is one of the worst things of sentiment that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that what is spoken.

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.