“I was pretty good at picking up new languages when I was little, but it's not like I had superpowers or anything.
Kids just have an easier time with words.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Vol. 4
“Languages, just like people, are worlds within themselves. They have the incredible ability to provide us with a clearer, more profound and detailed perspective of a culture and its views on life, nature, and death.”
― Orge Castellano
“The great enemy of foreign language learning is a sense of shame, an inability or unwillingness to become like a child again and let one's inadequacies show.”
― herbert a simon
“The brain is more like a muscle and less like a storage area. If you really want to be a writer, you should want to write a lot. If you want to write a lot, then you need to be in training. You are preparing to run marathons, not emptying a suitcase. Learning new languages, acquiring new vocabulary, keeping yourself in various forms of constant logocentric discipline is one of the best things you can do. And language acquisition is nothing if not logocentric discipline.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life
Learning languages is awesome.
It’s fun, challenging, exciting, rewarding…
Learn a new language and get a new soul.
– Czech proverb
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith
“I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.”
― Matt Groening
Meow” means “woof” in cat.”
― George Carlin
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
― Rumi
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”
― C.S. Lewis
Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.”
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
― W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948