Language Quotes

"Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar." "To say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words" "To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery" "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." "We inhabit a language rather than a country" "Philosophy is common sense with big words." "Human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light" "The pen is the tongue of the mind" "Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them." "To speak a true word is to transform the world" "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" "The name of the rose is a mere symptom of our nostalgia for a time when names meant something." "I want to see thirst inside the syllables" "Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly they’ll go through anything You read and you’re pierced" "Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true"