“A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.”
― Lev S. Vygotsky
“We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”
― Adam Gopnik
“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.”
― Rita Mae Brown
“Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.”
― Jeanette Winterson
“Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.”
― Tim O'Brien
“If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
“I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.”
― Alan Rickman
“Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it.”
― Seamus Heaney
“Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.”
― Clarice Lispector
“If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned.”
― Kim Thúy
“When the heart is down and the soul is heavy, the eyes can only speak the language of tears”
― Ikechukwu Izuakor
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”
― Ezra Pound
“Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. ”
― Steiner G
“The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.”
― Simon Van Booy
“Words are the clothes thoughts wear.”
― Samuel Beckett
“People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.”
― B. R. Myers
“Sometimes, language is the sound of longing”
― Simon Van Booy
“Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter.”
― Suzy Kassem
“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
― Gustave Flaubert