c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Why are there more male hyperpolyglots? One answer is that speaking a lot of languages is a geek macho thing (...) It seemed that a woman is less likely to say she "speaks" or "knows" a language if she studied it at some point in the past, while a man, wanting to display his giant repertoire, would include it.
— Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
Possible explanations for talented language learning fall into two general areas. One view says: What matters is a person's sense of mission and dedication to language learning. You don't need to describe high performers as biologically exceptional, because what they do is a product of practice. Anyone can become a foreign-language expert - even an adult. (...) The other view says: Something neurological is going on. We may not know exactly what the mechanisms are, but we can't explain exceptional outcomes fully through training or motivation.
— Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
One difference is that individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet he or she exceeds this optimum with a conspicuous consumption of brain power (...) For multilinguals, learning languages is an act of joining society. There's no motive, no separable 'will to plasticity' that's distinct from what it means to be a part of that society. Being a hyperpolyglot means exactly the opposite. The hyperpolyglot's pursuit of many languages may be a bridge to the rest of the world, but it walls him off from his immediate language community.
— Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
In English we blame others for not understanding us when really it's our fault for not saying what we wanted to say.
— Rory Dunlop, What We Didn't Say
Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when you're as serious a young man as Giovanni. He said to me the other night, 'When you are ironic, I am always behind you. I am slower. It is like you are the lightning and I am the thunder.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Most of the people who have verbally asserted that ‘there is no master of pronounciation’ have intentionally made a claim and unintentionally made their claim believable. (It is ‘pro-nun-ciation’ not ‘pro-noun-ciation’.)
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they're more "open to new experiences" than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self that's bound up in our native language, a "language ego", which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.
— Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
One of the first things to understand was how people knew what language to speak to whom. Where I've lived in the American Southwest, choosing to speak English or Spanish based on how someone looks is risky. If you try English and they don't speak it, you can switch to Spanish if you know it. But if you start with Spanish, you might offend: 'You don't think I speak English?' This can be the case if you're Anglo, even if you speak Spanish very well and just heard the other person speaking Spanish. When I described such an scenario to Indians, they couldn't relate — to them, choosing the wrong language wasn't embarrassing or politically charged. Or so they said.
— Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
The fact that early languages, no matter how many there are, utilize the same streams implies that the brain doesn't have a native language. The brain can only reflect the fact that a set of neural circuits was built and activated for a certain period of time. Nor does the brain care if those neural circuits map onto things that the rest of the world calls languages or dialects. It really cares only about what activates those circuits. Thus, the brain patters that typify language use across skill levels can be mapped.Brain imaging technology monitors the intensity of oxygen use around the brain - higher oxygen use represents higher energy use by cells burning glucose. The deeply engrained language circuits will create dim MRI images, because they are working efficiently, requiring less glucose overall. More recently acquired languages, as well as those used less frequently, would make neural circuits shine more brightly, because they require more brain cells, thus more glucose.
— Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
For the first time, I understood the ancients' need to find explanations for why things happen. It's a quintessential human imperative. Random is not emotionally satisfying. Therefore, lightning was the bolt from an angry god. Crop failure was punishment for failing to honor the gods with a fatted calf. The plague happened because you took the Lord's name in vain or coveted your neighbor's wife. Going to church regularly and praying could forestall illness. And on and on.
— Alanna Mitchell, Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths
Tourists and imperialists do not come to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home.
— Thorsten J. Pattberg
There is no universal language in the jungles; each species has its own language, and though the vocabulary of some is limited, as in the case of porcupines and vultures, the language of each species is understood by all the jungle-folk.
— Jim Corbett, The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag
One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words
— William Saroyan
Every kind of language is... specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages... an original language of total bodily gesture.This "original" language of total bodily gesture is thus the one and only real language, which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is using all the time. What we call speech and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which have undergone specialized development.
— R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art
We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn’t recognize huge wodges of human experience. Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn’t—or wasn’t—a word for it, everyone thinks it’s something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is “woking.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
In general,' Voss replied, 'it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language.
— Patrick White, Voss
Holding the lamb in his arms, Jesus watched the people file past, some coming, some going, some carrying animals to be sacrificed, some returning without them, looking joyful and exclaiming, Alleluia, Hosanna, Amen, or saying none of these things, feeling it was inappropriate to walk around shouting Hallelujah or Hip hip hurrah, because there is really not much difference between the two expressions, we use them enthusiastically until with the passage of time and by dint of repetition we finally ask ourselves, What does it mean, only to find there is no answer.
— José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Finally, I would like to point out that now in the age of English, choosing a language policy is not the exclusive concern of non-English-speaking nations. It is also a concern for English-speaking nations, where, to realize the world’s diversity and gain the humility that is proper to any human being, people need to learn a foreign language as a matter of course. Acquiring a foreign language should be a universal requirement of compulsory education. Furthermore, English expressions used in international conferences should be regulated and standardized to some extent. Native English speakers need to know that to foreigners, Latinate vocabulary is easier to understand than what to the native speakers is easy, child-friendly language. At international conferences, telling jokes that none but native speakers can comprehend is inappropriate, even if fun. If native speakers of English – those who enjoy the privilege of having their mother tongue as the universal language – would not wait for others to protest but would take steps to regulate themselves, what respect they would earn from the rest of the world! If that is too much to ask, the rest of the world would appreciate it if they would at least be aware of their privileged position – and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to be come a universal language used in every corner of the world English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language.If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes. Perhaps some of them might then begin to think that the truly blessed are not they themselves, but those who are eternally condemned to reflect on language, eternally condemned to marvel at the richness of the world.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
Every man who knows anything of languages, knows that it is impossible to translate from one language into another, not only without losing a great part of the original, but frequently of mistaking the sense.
— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
Voices have a language of their own and communicate much more than the words that they say.
— Indu Muralidharan, The Reengineers
All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.
— Annie Dillard
For the body tells all to him who knows the language, and doesn’t lie.
— Kai Ashante Wilson, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps
Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.
— Edith Grossman
You are the language so universalyou are forgottenBe my linguistTurn meinto your words.
— Bänoo Zan, Songs of Exile
Perhaps that's why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place : the self consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distance and kept the heart intact.
— Kiran Desai
Your first love is like your first language. No matter how many other languages you learn to speak, you can never be as good as in your first.
— Ahmed Alibage
Your first love is like your first language. No matter how many other languages you speak, you can never be as good as in your first.
— Ahmed Alibage
Life can be a misunderstanding, if we are ignorant of the right language or don’t try to learn it. « If lions could speak, we would not understand them. » says Ludwig Wittgenstein. If we make an effort, however, we could manage to understand. ( “ Life was a misunderstanding » )
— Erik Pevernagie
We thought speaking in English meant you were more intelligent. We were wrong of course. It does not matter what language you choose, the important thing is the words you use to express yourself.
— Malala Yousafzai
Humans make tools. Some animals make tools too. The making and using of tools is important for developing language, how we think and speak. If we do not make anything, it affects our thinking.
— Matthew De Abaitua, If Then
Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency"—the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why?
— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Gankis lifted an arm to point at the distant shale cliffs. "And in the face of it there were thousands of little holes, little what-you-call-'ems...""Alcoves," Kennit supplied in an almost dreamy voice. "I call them alcoves, Gankis. As would you, if you could speak your own mother tongue.
— Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic
A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.
— Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counter-example in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself), and gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a "featherless biped" and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken.
— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
It was the French of the Normans that, grafting itself onto the barbaric Saxon tongue, gave it its most magnificent blossoming. And, in these new countries, where both English and French are intertwined again, it is as if English were bathing itself in the fountain of its own youth, and as if French were remembering the buried treasures it had thought forgotten.
— Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos
The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.
— Italo Calvino, Six Memos For The Next Millennium
The authors disclose that in less than a century the word "tension" grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, "The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.
— Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.
— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The constructions and the different endings are not easy to master, especially if you are an English speaker.
— John  Mole, It's All Greek to Me!: A Tale of a Mad Dog and an Englishman, Ruins, Retsina--and Real Greeks
Astronomy is not the science of all objects with mass and weight and velocity. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Biology is not the science of all objects that consume and excrete and have inherited characteristics. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Linguistics is not the study of all possible symbols or symbol systems. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies.
— Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars
For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards.
— John  Mole, It's All Greek to Me!: A Tale of a Mad Dog and an Englishman, Ruins, Retsina--and Real Greeks
Lewis is like a gateway, making the riches of Deep Church more accessible.
— Alister E. McGrath, If I Had Lunch with C.S. Lewis: Exploring the Ideas of C.S. Lewis on the Meaning of Life
Many people just think they understand English, remember.
— Emma  Wagner
And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fiddle-faddle and not faddle- fiddle? Why is it ping-pong and pitter-patter rather than pong-ping and patter-pitter? Why dribs and drabs, rather than vice versa? Why can't a kitchen be span and spic? Whence riff-raff, mish-mash, flim-flam, chit-chat, tit for tat, knick-knack, zig-zag, sing-song, ding-dong, King Kong, criss-cross, shilly-shally, see-saw, hee-haw, flip-flop, hippity-hop, tick-tock, tic-tac-toe, eeny-meeny-miney-moe, bric-a-brac, clickety-clack, hickory-dickory-dock, kit and kaboodle, and bibbity-bobbity-boo? The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back.
— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
He said it twice because he had never said it before, and it sounded funny.
— A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Books , like landscapes, leave their marks in us. (...) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.
— Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks
The limits of your language are the limits of your world.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes;It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
The aim of interpretation is not agreement but understanding
— Donald Davidson
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.
— Aldous Huxley
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Film does not replace language, for it cannot exist without it. Film displaces language, exposes the abyss that threatens to engulf every semantic signification. Film parasitizes language, much as the animal does, drawing into its imaginary panorama that which remains undisclosed in discursivity. Cinema is a parasite.
— Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife
A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term "we" or "us" without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that "we" are all agreed on "our" interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics ("our sensibilities are enraged...") Always ask who this "we" is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron "Maulana" Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called "US." Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was "Wherever US is, We are." It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though that's not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.
— Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
He spoke Spanish, English, Italian, and just enough of every other language to be able to charm women around the world.
— Lynsey Addario, It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War
The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant. Shishtvanyanov: a gnashing and spluttering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can't understand the actual words, but we sense the contempt. You get used to contempt. After a while the commands just sound like a constant clearing of the throat—coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus. Trudi Pelikan said: Russian is a language that's caught a cold.
— Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel
Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.
— Anne Enright, Yesterday's Weather
Language has an ideological agenda that is apt to be hidden from view.
— Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Fire and water and smoke and incense and chanting and bells and butter and blood: this was a language whose syllables were translated into physical terms
—  a language of the elements. It was a language that he hoped might speak to him one day.
When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.
— Steven Pinker
The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.
— William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution
remember that misuse of language can lead to miscommunication, and that miscommunication leads to everything that has ever happened in the whole of the world
— joseph fink, jeffrey cranor
... as Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to 'metal objects designed to cause harm'.
— Austin Grossman, You
The English language is simply not logical. It is strong, free, and beautiful.
— Edward Nelson Teall
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.
— Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for me or you. Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages. In any new language, there should only be we.
— Andrew Smith
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
— Willard Van Orman Quine
I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.
— William H. Gass, The Tunnel
… this is my first language.” {on Writing}
— Dawn Garcia
It is noteworthy, the researcher further argued, that the inscription on the sword was engraved in the Romanian language, and, consequently, we see that Latin was actually Romanian, and not the invented language that for many centuries has passed for ancient Latin.
— Vladimir Lorchenkov, The Good Life Elsewhere
If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.
— Mary Norris
Since God doesn't have a name, I'll give him the name of Simptar. It doesn't come from any language. I give myself the name Amptala. As far as I know no such name exists. Perhaps in a language earlier than Sanskrit, an it-language.
— Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life
I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow.
— Terry Pratchett, The Long Utopia
Student-people are different from other people. They spend their entire life asking questions, and as soon as they have found out the answers, they start all over again with new, harder questions... when a student-person finds a good answer to a hard question, the other student-people will gasp, hug each other, and then throw a party. Those parties never last long, for student-people are in a hurry to go back to work and find new answers.
— Roberto Trotta, The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is
...it always felt good to have that moment of resolve, like saying, "I'm gonna learn French!" It doesn't matter if you do it or not, deciding is the high, right?
— Felicia Day, You're Never Weird on the Internet
Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.
— Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17
Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Time with a capital "T," which flows in the West. On the other hand, there was time with a small "t," which flows in Japan. Moreover, from that point on, the latter could exist only in relation to the former. It could no longer exist independently, yet it could not be the same as the other, either. If I, as a Japanese, find this new historical situation a bit tragic, it's not because Japanese people now had a live in two temporalities. It's rather because as a result of having to do so, they had no choice but to enter the asymmetrical relationship that had marked and continues to mark the modern world—the asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West, which is tantamount, however abstractly, to the asymmetrical relationship between what is universal and all the rest that is merely particular.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.
— Alexander Chee, Edinburgh
Try to understand how they feel - put yourselves in their place. Imagine you are in a foreign country with no money, possessions or friends. You cannot speak the language; the culture is completely different to your normal environment; isolated and helpless. You would be dependent on someone supporting you. Think of that when you next meet someone who is autistic...
— Michael Braccia, Could it be That Way: Living with Autism
Language is very tough, though, a tenacity that is backed up by a long history. However it is treated, its autonomy cannot be lost or seriously damaged, even if that treatment is rather rough. It is the inherent right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language in every way they can imagine—without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born.
— Haruki Murakami, Wind/Pinball: Two Novels
Adam was charming and spoke perfect French. Like many anglophones in Montréal, he actually spoke French better than we did. They knew exactly which verbs to use in the same way that people knew which utensils to use while eating at a fancy dinner. It was very proper because they learned it from books. They didn’t know slang or how to curse. They didn’t know how to do anything other than be proper and reserved. It was state-sponsored, dry-clean-only French.
— Heather O'Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night
He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must of been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composers. But when you made love he must of have said I love you and you understood that and it was true, too, because I have seen the desperation in his eyes ever since—no matter what business venture he thinks up.
— Toni Morrison, Paradise
As the language areas of the left hemisphere enter their sensitive period during the middle of the second year of life, grammatical language in the left integrates with the interpersonal and prosodic elements of communication already well developed in the right. As the cortical language centers mature, words are joined together to make sentences and can be used to express increasingly complex ideas flavored with emotion. As the frontal cortex continues to expand and connect with more neural networks, memory improves and a sense of time slowly emerges and autobiographical memory begins to connect the self with places and events, within and across time. The emerging narratives begin to organize the nascent sense of self and become the bedrock of our sense of self in interpersonal and physical space
— Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain
...if we were to associate the genius of a place with one particular thing – the Russians with literature, say, or the Germans with music, the Dutch and Spanish with painting – we would have to say that the true genius of Ancient India was language.
— Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were
The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.
— Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
The linguistic system represented in the mind-brain gives some account of everything submitted to it: good sentences, bad sentences, sentences in other languages, ums and ahs, coughs; perhaps -Chomsky suggests- even to non-linguistic events like a squeaking door.
— Neilson Voyne Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals
I want to hear you wound my lovely language with your rough barbarian tongue.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
it had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder.
— Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games
We need a language that brings us together about the deepest things we care about rather than pushing us apart.
— Joseph Jaworski, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership
How is it that you can read this book? An obvious answer is because you know English. An equally obvious answer is because the light is on. These two explanations for an apparently trivial ability can illuminate a fundamental dichotomy: the difference between our knowledge of language and our use of that knowledge; between our competence and our performance. Your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary of English, your competence as a speaker of English, is prerequisite to your understanding this sentence; the exercise of this competence is made possible by the fact, among many others, that the light is on.
— Neilson Voyne Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals
The world can move or not by changing some words.
— Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing Script Book
A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.
— Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point.
— Billy Marshall Stoneking
(...) this first-approximation reification of language very easily passes over unnoticed into a harder idealization, especially in everyday parlance. It is this idealization that, for instance, leads people to say that "the language" is degenerating because teenagers don't know how to talk anymore (they were saying that in the eighteenth century too!). It is also behind seeing the dictionary as an authority on the "correct meanings" of words rather than as an attempt to record how words are understood in the speech community. Even linguists adopt this stance all the time in everyday life (especially as teachers of students who can't write a decent paragraph). But once we go inside the heads of speakers to study their own individual cognitive structure, the stance must be dropped.
— Ray S. Jackendoff, Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution
Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation
— Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games
You don’t need to be a poet, a performer, a writer, or a journalist to tell your story powerfully. You do, however, need to elevate your language in ways that will bring your story to life clearly and imaginatively for others.
— John Capecci and Timothy Cage, Living Proof: Telling Your Story to Make a Difference
We humans speak many languages
—  flowers on the contrary speak only one language: The language of beauty!
She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father’s words, and her mother’s, and her sister’s. Utterly unlike Onnen’s otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn’t there.
— Nicola Griffith, Hild
Super 8 film is the language of silence.
— Rebecca McNutt, Super 8: The Sequel to Smog City
For Milady was well aware that her most seductive power was in her voice, which could run skilfully through the whole scale of tones, from mortal speech, upwards to the language of heaven.
— Alexandre Dumas
So is language change progress or degeneration? It is neither, of course. To assert that language change is for the better or worse requires some measure of what "good" or "bad" language is, and the issue of language change needn't come into question here. But no coherent criterion has ever been given: upon examination, the pronouncements of the self-appointed pundits are always a mix of cultural biases, half-understandings of languages, and an obvious compulsion for telling people what to do.
— Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used.
— Jess Walter
Life is a tiring business indeed.Soy sauce runs out. Milk runs out. Dishwashing detergent runs out. Lancôme lipsticks—I thought I had stockpiled several years' worth—run out. Dust underneath the dining table becomes dust balls. Newspapers and magazines pile up, and so does laundry. E-mail and junk mail keep coming. When occasion demands, I make myself presentable and I present myself. I listen to my sister's same old complaints on the phone. I withdraw money for my elderly mother, whose tongue works fine but whose body is a mess. I contact her caseworker. And now I have reached a stage in life when my own health is prone to betray me.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.
— Don DeLillo, Mao II
We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on. But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker. It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).
— Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature
And now it turns out that women can't even talk like men. Which is a clever way to invalidate women's discourse, isn't it? No wonder women can't do magic; no wonder spirits won't listen to their puny, trivial, voices. It's all woven into the basic structure of the language.
— Emily Croy Barker, The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic
The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it does involve an extra step, but even that isn't all that unusual. Welsh is like Shakespearean English on acid: the verb always - not just in questions - moves to the beginning. Alternatively, it can be viewed as taking the French grammar a step further. While the verb stops at tense in French, it moves further in Welsh to a position that traditional grammarians call the complementizer (don't ask).
— Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
Universal grammar is about what language is: it is to be distinguished from prescriptive grammars, often distilled in newspaper columns, which tell us what language should be. We are all entitled to our own opinions of what is appropriate, be it in the arrangement of words or flowers - as long as we keep in mind that these are just opinions. The properties of universal grammar linguists have unearthed, however, are a useful defense when language "authorities" try to rationalize their pontifications: none of the don'ts they advertise can be found in the book of universal grammar.
— Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
Now we have come full circle to the subtitle of this book: children learn by unlearning other languages. Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in the child's environment. And fitness, because we have competition, can be measured by the compatibility of a grammar with what a child hears in a particular linguistic environment. This theory of language takes both nature and nurture into account: nature proposes, and nurture disposes.
— Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
Is language actually getting better, shorter, and easier? Nowadays we often hear exactly the opposite. Teenager slang is awful, students no longer learn Latin, our children — not to mention our president — cannot put together a grammatical sentence. The whimsical poet Ogden Nash was at least half serious in his “Laments for a dying language”:Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age, A slovenliness-provides-its-own-excuse age, Where usage overnight condones misusage. Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,Once English, now a vile orangutanguage.
— Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.
— Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Language guardians have often blamed linguists as defenders of bad language: moral and cultural relativism is often tossed in at no extra charge. We as a profession are supposedly promoting the idea that anything goes in grammar... But no, we have never said anything goes in grammar. (...) When it comes to the proper use of language, universal grammar is the ultimate authority. It is not about what rules are deemed reasonable or popular; it is about what rules are true. And one sign for a true rule is that it appears in young children, long before they are polluted by dubious grammatical advice.
— Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
Language is what we use to tell stories, transmit knowledge, and build social bonds. It comforts, tickles, excites, and destroys. Every society has language, and somehow we all learn a language in the first few years of our lives, a process that has been repeated for as long as humans have been around. Unlike swimming, using Microsoft Windows, or making the perfect lemon souffle — which some of us never manage to do — learning a language is a task we can all take for granted.
— Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
Perceptions? Yesugei didn't give a goat's toenail about perceptions, but society was society. ...'Who gives a billy's balls what one or two wives have to say?''Quite, father.' This was strong language, to cite the nether parts, stronger than toenails.
— Bryn  Hammond, Amgalant One: The Old Ideal
We're basking in language itself. The silence of my friend. My love. The one beyond words in her silence. She is always eternally before. When she speaks it is shit, a gift, something to do. In our moment, of waiting, pointing, silent gear, what we went out for—that is pointing. Shit is the award. The award is shit.
— Eileen Myles
Chromosomes. Sex. Grasshoppers. "Pick me up, Mommy."This is an odd list, except in the eye of evolution. For in the major developments in the history of life, the ability to say, "Pick me up, Mommy" features prominently along with the emergence of genes, sexual reproduction, and multicellular organisms. On a smaller but no less wondrous scale, the ability to speak opens one mind to another. Babies announce their arrival with a loud cry, but it is their first words that launch the journey of a lifetime.
— Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
As I'm sure you know, there are two types of "What?" in the world. The first type simply means "Excuse me, I didn't hear you. Could you please repeat yourself?" The second type is a little trickier. It means something more along the lines of "Excuse me, I did hear you, but I can't believe that's really what you meant.
— Lemony Snicket, The Austere Academy
Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.
— Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts
Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are "evolving" past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly.
— Colin Quinn, The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America
Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as "light," "sound," "stars," "music"—words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in themselves, any more than "chips" or "sawdust." It is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful. I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be like those little words, "light" and "music," stirring the long-winding fibres of your memory and enriching your present with your most precious past.
— George Eliot, Adam Bede
I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.
— Langston Hughes
Words simply mean what people think they mean when they say them.
— Mike Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.
— Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred
Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to describe their new discoveries form a giant growing lexicon that means English is simply bursting with new possibilities, resembling the Elizabethan age in that respect. Then conceptually, science is creating new stories to tell, by deluging us with new information and potentialities. In this deluge we need art to do its usual job of sorting things out, by giving things their human dimension and by exploring how they might feel and what they might mean. So to me the arts and the sciences are completely intertwined. Maybe that's always been true, but now more than ever.
— Kim Stanley Robinson
God did not give us the gospel to convince humanity
—  the gospel was given to us to master the language of a new world called God's Paradise. John 15:16.
You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.
— Mary Norris, Between You  Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly
— Sara Nović, Girl at War