Watch Your Language

I love words. As a first grade teacher, I'm even getting into the nitty gritty of the letters and sounds. And I love those too. At least sometimes, these words express our language. Language is a funny thing to nail down, slippery and sharp at the same time. I've been collecting quotes about language: what it is and what it isn't. These make me think about the words I choose, and what words mean to different people. Nice things to ponder on a Sunday night. 

It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case, always the wrong size to fit the template called language. | Jeanette Winterson

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures. | Vincent van Gogh

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words. | George Eliot

The best way in the world to deceive believers is to cloak a message in religious language and declare that it conveys some new insight from God. | Charles Stanley

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language. | John Donne. 

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation. | Noam Chomsky

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies. | Theodor Adorno

A riot is the language of the unheard. | Martin Luther King, Jr.

The finest command of language is often shown by saying nothing. | Roger Babson

Of all of oru inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language. | Walt Disney 

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water. | Franklin P. Jones

But I like Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. | Chinua Achebe

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. | Toni Morrison