Sign Language Quotes

My cat speaks sign language with her tail. ~ Robert A. M. Stern

I'm a first-time father, and it was amazing to me to learn that my son could actually use sign language before the spoken word. I could see this intelligence in his eyes before he could speak: how he could understand what was going on around him and was frustrated by that. ~ Matt Reeves

He didn't think it possible to sign sewage-sucking-excuse-of-a-baseborn-bilge-rat but somehow Gurn managed. ~ Grace Draven

Heard about the young deaf boy who used sign language-One day he told his mother a dirty joke and she washed his hands out with soap ~ Red Skelton

Okay, stud, just one more question." She formed an L with her thumb and index finger. 'Why are some people in the audience holding the sign for "loser"?'
It was my turn to laugh at her. 'That's not for loser.' I set down my soda, mirrored her gesture with my hand, then straightened our pinkies to form the sign-language letter. 'The L stands for "love". ~ Jeri Smith-Ready

I was a prisoner inside my own body. I felt desperate, angry, stupid, confused, ashamed, hopeless and absolutely alone... and that this was of my own making. I could speak at home, how come I couldn't outside it? I have never been able to find the right words to describe what it was like. Imagine that for one day you are unable to speak to anyone you meet outside your own family, particularly at school/college, or out shopping, etc., have no sign language, no gestures, no facial expression. Then imagine that for eight years, but no one really understands. It was like torture, and I was the only person that knew it was happening. My body and face were frozen most of the time. I became hyperconscious of myself when outside the home and it was a relief to get back as I was always exhausted. I attempted to hide it (an impossible task) because I felt so ashamed that I couldn't do what other people seemed to find so natural and easy - to speak. At times I felt suicidal. ~ Carl Sutton

See, I understand what no one else seems to grasp. Communication is manipulation. Every time we speak we are trying to achieve an effect - a goal. We first learn to talk so we may better manipulate our parents. Sign language. Grunting and pointing. Wearing certain clothes and baubles. Walking or standing a certain way. This is all language and it is all manipulation. ~ Michael R. Fletcher

I Need to Learn Many, Many More Cusswords in Sign Language ~ Rick Riordan

A lot of times, if you watch sign language interpreters, there can be some lag time issues. When that happens, I think you lose the hearing audience. ~ Jack Jason

Keep a journal, and learn how to see how you as an individuals sees information so you can learn your own sign language. Meditate and practice psychic self defense and surrounding yourself with prayer. ~ John Edward

Questions lead to further questions, and inquiry breeds insight. Gathering expertise brings both confidence and consolation. E. O. Wilson wrote: "You start by loving a subject. Birds, probability theory, stars, differential equations, storm fronts, sign language, swallowtail butterflies....The subject will be your lodestar and give sanctuary in the shifting mental universe. ~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt

The more people that learn sign language, the better. This is part of my life, but it's not part of everybody's life, so it's nice to expose this to the world. ~ Sean Berdy

Systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus we do not yet have experience with the
adult language abilities of monkeys and apes. One of the most intriguing questions is whether a verbally accomplished chimpanzee mother will be able to communicate language to her offspring. It seems very likely that this should be possible and that a community of chimps initially competent in gestural
language could pass down the language to subsequent generations. ~ Carl Sagan

I went on a blind date last night. We watched a silent film. We stayed up all night talking in sign language. I fell asleep in the fetal position in her cat's litter box. Ah, 'twas a great night. I'll never forget dancing with an albino under the stars. ~ Jarod Kintz

I don't want to make a big deal about this or anything, but I think it's kind of cool how you do everything you do."
I squinted at him.
"I mean, you use sign language, and it's hard to communicate. But you're into art and you can seriously cook and, for goodness' sakes, you can even jitterbug. By the way, I told my mom, and she wants a video. Totally doesn't believe me. But, yeah, I think it's nice that you don't let a little hitch in life slow you down. I admire that."
I smiled. For a minute, I admired myself, too. He didn't know how deep my problems ran, but he was right all the same. It was no small thing to try, to find out what you cared about in life. Even this moment, with this wonderful, temporary boy beside me, was a tiny miracle. I ought to give myself some credit. ~ Kiera Cass

They put the picture in the window when they have something, take it away when they don't. Sign language. ~ Margaret Atwood

He pointed toward the silhouettes on the side of the [bathrooms] instead
black cutout man, black cutout woman. The man had his legs apart, the woman had hers together. Pretty much the story of the human race in sign language. ~ Stephen King

My sister Amy lives above a deaf girl and has learned quite a bit of sign language. She taught some to me and so now I am able to say, SANTA HAS A TUMOR IN HIS HEAD THE SIZE OF AN OLIVE. MAYBE IT WILL GO AWAY TOMORROW BUT I DON'T THINK SO. ~ David Sedaris

Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love. ~ Oliver Sacks

I've never seen you flip the bird, RJ," Luke says.
I can't stop the little smile that creeps up onto my lips.I really don't know what came over me.I've never been the vixen.I'm always one hundred percent good girl.
"Yeah,it felt weird.And wrong. And awesome."
"Well,you're lucky Mr. Bates didn't see you.Principles usually frown on that kind of sign language." He laughs.
"Mr. Bates can suck it," I say defiantly.
"Whoa!" Luke replies and we both laugh. "Have you been watching wrestling with Ben again? Admit it, Ricki Jo. You love oiled-up fat guys in unitards."
"Ew! ~ Alecia Whitaker

These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colours on his palette. ~ Hermann Hesse

I've gone into the outside world to reobserve society. The sign language of emotion I once knew has been replaced by a matrix of interrelated equations. Lines of force twist and elongate between people, objects, institutions, ideas. The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do. At ~ Ted Chiang

Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages. ~ Ferdinand De Saussure

Have you noticed, now, the way people talk so loudly in snackbars and cinemas, how the shelved back gardens shudder with prodigies of talentlessness, drummers, penny-whistlers, vying transistors, the way you see and hear the curses and sign-language of high sexual drama at the bus-stops under ghosts of clouds, how life has come out of doors? And in the soaked pubs the old-timers wince and weather the canned rock. We talk louder to make ourselves heard. We will all be screamers soon. ~ Martin Amis

Do deaf schizophrenics hear voices in sign language? ~ Nick James

An inquiry which I once made into the psychology of the Indian sign language with a view to discovering a possible relation between it and Greek manual gesture as displayed in ancient graphic art, led to the conclusion that Indian rhythms arise rather in the centre of self-preservation than of self-consciousness. Which is only another way of saying that poetry is valued primarily by the aboriginal for the reaction it produces within himself rather than for any effect he is able to produce on others by means of it. ~ Carl Sandburg

If I only could communicate in sign language, I couldn't visit other deaf people overseas because I'd be worried I couldn't understand their accents. ~ David McMullen-Sullivan

There must be something in here that can drill through eight miles of
solid rock."
He considered a hand drill, a tape measure, a corkscrew, and the iron staff we'd almost died retrieving from Geirrod's fortress. He threw them all to the floor.
"Nothing!" he said in disgust. "Useless junk!"
Perhaps you could use your head, Hearthstone signed. That is very hard.
"Oh, don't try to console me, Mr. Elf," said Thor. ~ Rick Riordan

Bob Goff, the craziest lawyer, love activist, world-changer I know, and the delightful author of Love Does, says this: The world can make you think that love can be picked up at a garage sale or enveloped in a Hallmark card. But the kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice and presence. It's a love that operates more like a sign language than being spoken outright. . . . The brand of love Jesus offers is . . . more about presence than undertaking a project. It's a brand of love that doesn't just think about good things, or agree with them, or talk about them . . . Love does.1 ~ Lysa TerKeurst

Sign Language: Young Kids Know More Than They Can Say When you think about it, it's not so easy ~ Harvey Karp

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child. ~ Jane Goodall

Are you having performance issues?" I asked in surprise. "Bite your tongue," Vlad said, with a snort. "I was seeing if Dermot understood sign language, but from the look on his face, it seems not. ~ Jeaniene Frost

He had figured out that thoughts exist in silence and have no colour or sound or shape until they are turned into words. Spoken words exist in the mind first and then go to the voice and sit temporarily inside ears, and if words are conveyed through sign language, they exist in the motion of hands. ~ Rita Leganski

Well, usually when a person shakes their head," said McGonagall coldly, "they mean 'no.' So unless Miss Edgecombe is using a form of sign language as yet unknown to humans... ~ J.K. Rowling

A loose board on the boat's deck creaked under Hadrian's weight and Royce glared at him. Twelve years they had worked together, and still Royce did not seem capable of understanding that Hadrian could not float. The problem was that Royce apparently could. He made it look so easy. Hadrian walked like the caricature of a thief - on his toes, his arms out for balance, wavering up and down as if he were on a tightrope. Royce walked as casually as if he were sauntering down a city street. They communicated as they always did on the job, with facial expressions and hand gestures. Royce had learned sign language as part of his guild training but had never bothered teaching Hadrian more than a few signals. Royce was always able to communicate what he needed by pointing, counting with his fingers, or making simple obvious signs like scissoring his fingers across his level palm, imitating legs walking on a floor. He expressed most of his silent dialogue the way he was now: through rolled eyes, glares, and the pitiable shaking of his head. Given how irritated he so often looked, it was a mystery why he put up with Hadrian. ~ Michael J. Sullivan

I must say I'm not 100% fluent in Sign Language, but I am working on it! ~ Sundra Oakley

I took some classes in sign language when I was in my early teens because I was told that I would be completely deaf very early. But I never really wanted to learn. ~ Stephanie Beacham

As long as we have deaf people on earth, we will have signs. And as long as we have our films, we can preserve signs in their old purity. It is my hope that we will all love and guard our beautiful sign language as the noblest gift God has given to deaf people. ~ George Veditz

In addition to Ameslan, chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are being taught a variety of other gestural languages. And it is just this transition from tongue to hand that has permitted humans to regain the ability-lost, according to Josephus, since Eden-to communicate with the animals. ~ Carl Sagan

I wanted to say Thank You in sign language, but instead I sneezed and ended up shooting out an I love you. Affection covers more area than a tissue. ~ Jarod Kintz

I flipped him a gesture that he wouldn't need sign language to understand. ~ Rick Riordan

And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons. ~ Andrew Solomon

Sign language was a great experience. I have a deaf aunt that I am able to communicate with because of that class. ~ Richard Sherman

If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people. ~ John Jay Chapman

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation. ~ Paul Theroux

The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet nonphonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one's thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice. With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trance-like moments during the day when my thoughts weren't expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind's eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane. As ~ Ted Chiang

And what do you know, John's hands flew through the positions
of ASL in various l-got-this combinations.
"Is he deaf" the guy behind the cash register asked in a stage
whisper. As if someone using American Sign Language was some kind
of freak.
"No. Blind."
"Oh."
As the man kept staring, Qhuinn wanted to pop him. "You going
to help us out here or what?"
"Oh ... yeah. Hey, you got a tattoo on your face." Mr. Observant
moved slowly, like the bar codes on those bags were creating some kind of wind resistance under his laser reader. "Did you know that?"
Really. "I wouldn't know."
'Are you blind, too?"
No filter on this guy. None. "Yeah, I am."
"Oh, so that's why your eyes are all weird."
"Yeah. That's right."
Qhuinn took out a twenty and didn't wait for change-murder
was just a liiiiiittle too tempting. Nodding to John, who was also measuring the dear boy for a shroud, Qhuinn went to walk off.
"What about your change ?" the man called out.
"I'm deaf, too. I can't hear you."
The guy yelled more loudly, "I'll just keep it then, yeah?"
"Sounds good," Qhuinn shouted over his shoulder.
Idiot was stage-five stupid. Straight up. ~ J.R. Ward

We did not, of course, speak Mandarin, but the question "What the hell do you think you're doing?" has a familiar ring in any language. The mere idea of even attempting to account for ourselves defeated us. We settled instead for explaining, by means of elaborate mime and sign language, that we were barking mad. This worked. He accepted it, but then hung around in the background to watch us anyway. ~ Douglas Adams

Her mother would be appalled, but she wouldn't say anything. She would just telegraph her distress with tightened lips and raised brows. She was good at that. Clemmie's mother's brows were better than sign language, complicated concepts conveyed with the minimum of movement. ~ Lauren Willig

Tolkien made dwarf sign language because, you know, it's too loud to talk in the mines. ~ Richard C. Armitage

I can see that 'Switched at Birth' is attracting audiences because of the diversity and the American Sign Language as well. American Sign Language is such a beautiful language, and people want more of that. ~ Sean Berdy

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth. ~ George Eliot

We obviously can't compete with the big clubs trying to sign world class stars, but we've already identified some very good players and we'll see what happens. ~ Paul Jewell

To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. ("The Medusa") ~ Thomas Ligotti

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human ... you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, 'My humanity is inextricably bound up in yours.' We belong in a bundle of life. ~ Desmond Tutu

Good manners are a sign of strength. ~ Dick Francis

French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

From eating at El Pollo Loco salsa bar to the Golden Globes buffet, I managed to stumble through this journey with the perseverance of an immigrant and the mindset of an American. I learned to thrive on being uncomfortable to pursue what I loved. The English language was uncomfortable, so I studied BET until it became my natural tongue. Doing stand-up was uncomfortable, so I hung out at the Comedy Palace until it became my second home. Auditions were uncomfortable, so I spent six hundred bucks a month on acting classes while I slept in some dude's living room for three hundred bucks until acting became my profession. I never looked at these challenges as barriers; I saw them as opportunities to grow. I'd rather try to pursue my dream knowing that I might fail miserably than to have never tried at all. That is How to American. ~ Jimmy O. Yang

I need you to understand something. I wrote this for you. I wrote this for you and only you. Everyone else who reads it, doesn't get it. They may think they get it, but they don't. This is the sign you've been looking for. You were meant to read these words. ~ Iain S. Thomas

By attempting to surgically erase or "correct" visual traits that connect women of colour to their ancestry, these shows perpetrate a symbolic form of ethnic cleansing. That this is justified via the language of individuality and appropriateness - under the guise of helping women "retain her distinctive ethnic appearance" - make it all the more insidious. ~ Jennifer L. Pozner

Let's not become so worried about not offending anybody that we lose the ability to distinguish between respect and paranoia. ~ Larry King

Damn and blast!" "Curates can't use language like that," I reminded my brother, and he grinned involuntarily. "I'm getting it out of my system," was his excuse. ~ Susanna Kearsley

I said in sharp language that that practice was wrong. ~ Ken Starr

Regarding children's literature, look for interesting content and well-constructed sentences clothed in literary language. The imagination should be warmed and the book should hold the interest of the child. Life's too short to spend time with books that bore us. ~ Deborah Taylor-Hough

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. ~ Pat Conroy

Life is suffering" is misleading for at least two reasons. First, the Buddha used an ancient Indian language similar to Sanskrit called Pali, and the word he used in Pali for the first noble truth, dukkha, is difficult to translate. Dukkha is too multifaceted and nuanced a term to be captured in the one-word translation "suffering." And second, the fact of dukkha in our lives doesn't mean that life is only dukkha. ~ Toni Bernhard

People with green eyes were close to the fairies, we were told; they were just here for a little while, looking for a human child they could take away. If we ever met anyone with one green and one brown eye we were to cross ourselves, for that was a human child that had been taken over by the fairies. The brown eye was the sign it had been human. When it died, it would go into the fairy mounds that lay behind the Donegal mountains, not to heaven, purgatory, limbo or hell like the rest of us. These strange destinations excited me, especially when a priest came to the house of a dying person to give the last rites, the sacrament of Extreme Unction. That was to stop the person going to hell. Hell was a deep place. You fell into it, turning over and over in mid-air until the blackness sucked you into a great whirlpool of flames and you disappeared forever. ~ Seamus Deane

Hugging a tree, understanding the language of trees and sending loving kindness to trees will make you rich. Because it connects you to the source - the source of abundance. ~ Amit Ray

Jubal threw his sign down in disgust and stalked away from the group. Sosi ran after him, the clipboard with the soggy petition ~ Anne McCaffrey

He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more ... well, pleasant. ~ Mary Balogh

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth. ~ Antonin Artaud

There was something about siblings - a language that was half memory and half glance. Jests and jibes. They were a tangle of love and resentment, and despite their differences, Ryn knew he would defend her to the death. ~ Emily Lloyd-Jones

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom. ~ Evelyn Waugh

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing? ~ Ken Follett

Yes, it would nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story. ~ Andrew Barger

Gear-shifting is thus a phenomenon of a higher logical type than giving gas, and it would be patently nonsensical to talk about the mechanics of complex gears in the language of the thermodynamics of fuel supply. ~ Paul Watzlawick

The number of theatres that regularly played art films (defined as foreign language films and English language films produced abroad without American financing) increased from around one hundred in 1950 to close to 700 by the 1960s. Foreign film distribution in the United States was originally handled by dozens of small independent outfits, but when Brigitte Bardot's And God Created...Woman broke box-office records in 1956, Hollywood took over. In search of foreign pictures with commercial ingredients, the majors absorbed the most talented foreign film-makers with offers of total financing and promises of distribution in the lucrative US market. ~ Tino Balio

The environmental crisis is a sign that the ecosphere is now so heavily strained that its continued stability is threatened. It is a warning that we must discover the source of this suicidal drive and master it before it destroys the environment-and ourselves. ~ Barry Commoner

A casual attitude toward human hurt and pain is the surest sign of educational failure. ~ Norman Cousins

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. ~ George Steiner

The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them. ~ J M G Le Clezio

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two. ~ Geoffrey Willans

I love that you can have the language between the two worlds of technology and fashion, because I don't think that many designers get to do that. ~ Stella McCartney

He read with intensity and was passionately in love with every character, every turn of plot or twist of language. He made the characters come alive for us, like he wasn't reading a work of fiction but telling stories about his own friends. ~ Sarah Ockler

Homosexual,' generally used in scientific works is of course a bastard word. 'Homogenic' has been suggested, as being from two roots, both Greek, i.e., 'homos,' same, and 'genos,' sex. ~ Edward Carpenter

Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgement any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all from this small corner of the earth. ~ Gerald Of Wales

The subtleties of the mind cannot be transmitted in words, but can be seen in words. ~ Juefan Huihong

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Anxiety is a sign that you have made up a story contrary to reality. Love does not fear. ~ Alan Cohen

I understand now that nothing amazing is ever accomplished without fear. It's a sign that you're on the road to experiencing greatness. ~ Derek Hough

Our approach was very simple. It was about creating a universal language. A show that will be attractive toward every people coming from all over the world. And that was a big thing. ~ Guy Laliberte

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior. ~ Robert Bringhurst