Language Structure Quotes

What fascinated me about English was what I later recognized as its hybrid etymoogy: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects is invigorating, richly entertaining, and often funny, as it is to Shaskespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry.. ~ Camille Paglia

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The one overall structure in my plays is language. ~ Edward Bond

Of all the languages that have existed upon the Earth, the Hebrew language is unique and extraordinary in its ability to paint vivid pictures with words that lodge within the heart conveying deep and profound Truth".

~R. Alan Woods [2012] ~ R. Alan Woods

Their mutual gravitational attraction will ultimately cause them to collapse inward, in manifest disagreement with an apparently static universe. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself. ~ Noam Chomsky

Programming language is very specific to instructing a computer to do a particular structure of a sequence. It's the very way you tell the machine what you want it to do. ~ Brian Kernighan

You have already achieved the English-Language poet's most important goal: you can read, Write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence. ~ Stephen Fry

I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The first thing we should do in order to grasp the realm of time travel is by redefining
general perception and common concepts regarding time within our daily language structure. ~ Toba Beta

I know what the structure of the language is. ~ Kurt Loder

Ultimate meaning is meaningless. Meaning meaning means everything else. ~ Brian Spellman

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. ~ Oscar Wilde

As a matter of fact, no other language in the world has received such praise as the Lithuanian language. The garlands of high honour have been taken to Lithuanian people for inventing, elaborating, and introducing the most highly developed human speech with its beautiful and clear phonology. Moreover, according to comparative philology, the Lithuanian language is best qualified to represent the primitive Aryan civilization and culture. ~ Immanuel Kant

I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language. ~ Aimee Bender

I would say to her, in that mixed river language we used, 'One day, Beth, somebody will snatch your case. It isn't safe to travel about with money like that.' 'The day that happens, Mis' Salim, I will know the time has come to stay home.' It was a strange way of thinking. But she was a strange woman. ~ V.S. Naipaul

If fast-paced entertainment is not among the pleasures generally offered by the literary novel,
other pleasure often abound: a richness of language, a heart-breaking depiction of difficult emotions, and an exploration of interesting ideas. ~ Joshua Henkin

I'd thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she'd surpassed all the language I had for it. ~ Anne Rice

We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler. ~ Paul Graham

We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in. ~ William, Saroyan

I patch together a living language out of reanimated parts, like Frankenstein, and feel no disgust at scrabbling in the charnel house. Each of us makes her own monster, who earns a cozy co-tenancy of our tomb. We're all the last native speakers of a language that dies with us. Am I so special for tasting the rot on my tongue? For knowing whose remains I'm kitted out in? ~ Shelley Jackson

French is the language that turns dirt into romance. ~ Stephen King

There is a fixation in the human mind for structures, because in a structured life one feels secure, one knows where one is, one knows where one stands in relationship to the other. It seems that because man is born in the womb of the mother and for nine months remains in a structure, that continues deep down in the psyche - and man is always trying to find a structure somewhere. ~ Rajneesh

From that high up, language or the lack of it didn't matter much. The swirling currents of people were way better than anything on TV. Even on cable. Except, possibly, the Armenian Channel. ~ Julia Claiborne Johnson

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty ~ Cucuk Espe

There is a Rainbow Bridge. It's like dog heaven. We run and play and never get fat. The sun is always warm but not hot, the water is fresh and cold, and we get to just be dogs. We all take turns waiting. The bridge is a beautiful wooden structure that crosses over from dog land to the other side when our owners come. Time means nothing to us, which is hard for humans to understand. ~ Jennifer Probst

Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors. ~ Rudolf Arnheim

The Ilhalmiut do not fill canvases with their paintings, or inscribe figures on rocks, or carve figurines in clay or in stone, because in the lives of the People there is no room for the creation of objects of no practical value. What purpose is there in creating beautiful things if these must be abandoned when the family treks out over the Barrens? But the artistic sense is present and strongly developed. It is strongly alive in their stories and songs, and in the string-figures, but they also use it on the construction of things which assist in their living and in these cases it is no less an art. The pleasure of abstract creation is largely denied to them by the nature of the land, but still they know how to make beauty.
They know how to make beauty, and they also know how to enjoy it-- for it is no uncommon thing to see an Ilhalmio man squatting silently on a hill crest and watching, for hours at a time, the swift interplay of colors that sweep the sky at sunset and dawn. It is not unusual to see an Ilhalmio pause for long minutes to watch the sleek beauty of a weasel or to stare into the brilliant heart of some minuscule flower. And these things are done quite unconsciously, too. There is no word for 'beauty'--as such--in their language; it needs no words in their hearts. ~ Farley Mowat

Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist. ~ Daniel Gardner

See, we live in a phallus obsessed culture, where we're all brought up to believe that everything having to do with gender and sexuality somehow revolves around the penis. That's why so many clueless straight guys come on to dykes with pickup lines like "Once you've had the real thing, baby, you won't ever go back." Some men actually believe that phallocentric crap! And it's also why most people can't even talk about transsexual women or SRS without centring the discussion on the penis. But my desire to have SRS has virtually nothing to do with my penis. This is about my wanting to have a clitoris and vagina. But we don't even have the language to describe this desire. ~ Julia Serano

I dream of a garden overripe and wild. Of a woman gathering the sea into her hands and letting it fall in many colored petals to a green, green earth. I dream of words on a page transforming to birds, and birds transforming to children, and children transforming to stars. ~ Kelly Barnhill

The world needs more Edwin Morgans, people who can take the language and swing it round their heads and don't care what you think. ~ Billy Connolly

Break the ice, or draw that which lives in the dimness out into the full light of speech - what happens is the same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in its clearness, the shadowy thing that was. ~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

Poetry rhymes, a song our souls need to nourish upon. Poetry is a drum, a sound our bodies wish to have. Poetry is organized, a reading our eyes wish to view. Poetry is refined, a structure our moral selves seek. Poetry is civil, instigating the world to remain sane. Poetry is not ordinary, but it needs the ordinary eyes to continue to be the interesting art form of expression. Poetry is like a child communicating, who later grows to be an adult communicating in prose. ~ Gloria D. Gonsalves

Asked nicely, and that didn't seem to work. So I thought you'd be useful. Your language is more uncivilized than mine. ~ Krista Ritchie

The language of the face is not taught by the schools; it is intuitive, and to the observant is always legible. ~ Julia Ward Howe

The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. ~ Joe Armstrong

[deconstruction and other French theories] was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented. ~ Charlton Laird

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell. ~ Harold Ramis

Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival. ~ Harold Innis

You learn timing on the road. You learn structure and how to read an audience. You learn so much about the business of laughter that you can't learn on a set, because it's all on you. Sometimes you bomb, and you know not to tell that joke again ... You just hope people find the humor in the awkwardness. ~ Marlon Wayans

As a romance novelist, I have a rather skewed view of babies. You see, they don't typically fit into the classic structure of the romance novel - romance is about two people finding each other and falling in love against insurmountable odds. Babies ... well ... babies are complicated. ~ Sarah MacLean

I believe language is infinitely malleable, a live being in our hands, which deserves our great respect and curiosity ~ Brian Kiteley

To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the Apache language there is no word for 'guilt.' Our lives are like diamonds. When we are born we are pure and uncut. Each thing that happens to us in our lives teaches us how to reflect the light in the world; each experience gives us a new cut, a new facet in our diamond. How brilliantly do those diamonds sparkle whose facets are many, to whom life has given many cuts! ~ Daniel J. O’Leary Quoting Bearwatcher, An Apache Medicine Man

We don't have any splits here. The players country is Liverpool Football Club and their language is football. ~ Gerard Houllier

Scala is also a functional language in the sense that every function is a value and because every value is an object so ultimately every function is an object. ~ Anonymous

It took them longer, a week or so, to notice the hole in their language that this new word had made. To grasp that there was no term for a parent without a child, a sister without a sister. ~ Emma Hooper

You are my friend, Prairie Flower. If I tell you what is in my heart, will you promise never to tell?"
Prairie Flower laid a hand on Jesse's shoulder, pulling it away quickly when her friend flinched in pain. "I will not betray my friend."
Taking a deep breath, Jesse lifted her head. "When Rides the Wing comes near to me, my heart sings.But I do not believe that he cares for me.I am clumsy in all of the things a Lakota woman must know.I cannot speak his language without many childish mistakes. And..." Jesse reached up to lay her hand on her short hair, "I am nothing to look at.I am not..."
Prairie Flower grew angry. "I have told you he cares for you.Can you not see it?"
Jesse shook her head.
Prairie Flower spoke the unspeakable. "Then,if you cannot see that he cares for you in what he does,you must see it in what he has not done. You have been in his tepee. Dancing Waters has been gone many moons."
"Stop!" Jesse demanded. "Stop it! I..just don't say any more!" She leaped up and ran out of the tepee-and into Rides the Wind, who was returning from the river where he had gone to draw water.
Jesse knocked the water skins from both of his hands. Water spilled out and she fumbled an apology then bent stiffly to pick up the skins, wincing with the effort.
"I will do it, Walks the Fire." His voice was tender as he bent and took the skins from her.
Jesse protested, "It is the wife's job." She blushed, realizing that she had used a wrong wor ~ Stephanie Grace Whitson

In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others. ~ Stephen Burt

The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling. ~ David Abram

Through language, we can tell the truth and hear the truth spoken, just as we can be deceived. Sometimes it's a painful realization: we can be lied to. As I write, I think of myself as putting my eye under oath, so that what I write is the truth about my characters. ~ Michael Cadnum

Anger is the fire of the soul, love is the language of the heart ... ~ Stephen Richards

The basic structure of the universe is balanced on a razor's edge for life to exist ~ Sunday Adelaja

When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

He told me that once, in the war, he'd come upon a German soldier in the grass with his insides falling out; he was just lying there in agony. The soldier had looked up at Sergeant Leonard, and even though they didn't speak the same language, they understood each other with just a look. The German lying on the ground; the American standing over him. He put a bullet in the soldier's head. He didn't do it with anger, as an enemy, but as a fellow man, one soldier helping another. ~ Libba Bray

I don't like to hurry. I'm not a conductor of the fast, fiery romantic type. I prefer Bruckner, with the sincerity of his musical language and the huge time spans in which his ideas develop, to Mahler, with his hysteria and self-indulgence. ~ Jeffrey Tate

Music is the one ultimate universal language to speak with every soul. ~ Ramona Matta

I find labels "liberal" and "conservative" of little meaning. Our language has become perverted along with the thoughts of many of us. ~ Studs Terkel

I don't think it's not feminist to use every tool you have to succeed, and part of that is being a woman - presenting yourself in a certain way. ~ Christina Hendricks