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.

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.

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of...

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to...

From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written. However, an old children's riddle does seem to come close. It is the one that poses the question "How do...

Language is more fashion than science

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. -the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the...

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of...

In France the most often used word is connerie, which means bullshit, and in America it's hands-down awesome, which has replaced incredible, good, and even just OK. Pretty much everything that isn't...

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if...

I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

What you should do, she told Fat during one of his darker hours, is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34. Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion...

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple...