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101 " She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies. "
― Jodi Picoult , Nineteen Minutes
102 " I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life "
― William H. Gass
103 " We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable. "
― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
104 " In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage. "
― Ian McEwan , Amsterdam
105 " A native tongue, in my opinion, isn't the language spoken where you were born or the first language you learned; it's a language that makes you feel at home. It's a language that you don't command, but that commands you. And without it, you'd feel lost, unsure of how to express to the world everything you care enough to express. "
― Adi Alsaid
106 " it strikes me that the writers most deeply concerned with the state of literary fiction and its biases against women could do a lot worse than trying to coin some terms of their own: to name the archetypes they wish to invert or criticise and thereby open up the discussion. If authors can be thought of as magicians in any sense, then the root of our power has always rested with words: choosing them, arranging them and – most powerfully – inventing them. Sexism won’t go away overnight, and nor will literary bias. But until then, if we’re determined to invest ourselves in bringing about those changes, it only makes sense to arm ourselves with a language that we, and not our enemies, have chosen.May 14, 2011 Blog post "
― Foz Meadows
107 " When somebody speaks a language that we don’t know, we often imagine that some important things are being said! "
108 " That's just like the manual says,' said Witherwax. " If we want to have international brotherhood, we gotta get a language that everybody understands all the time.''You mean with no homonyms?' said Doc Brenner.Mr. Gross belched again, and held up two fingers to indicate another Boilermaker. 'Are you saying that the language a fella speaks can make a fairy of him?' (" Gin Comes In Bottles" ) "
109 " Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent. "
― Ariel Sabar , My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq
110 " We can only think in a language that we master. "
― Miguel Ruiz , The Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery
111 " Our body talks to us, not in a language that you speak but the language that you feel "
112 " How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem. "
― Rebecca Solnit , The Mother of All Questions
113 " Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been. "
― David Crystal , How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die
114 " If you want a language to survive, capture great thoughts within it. William Shakespeare has ensured Elizabethan English will never perish from this world. "
― James Rozoff
115 " Jerkish" . That was the name of a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees - and there was no doubt (...) that more and more unfortunate creatures would be able to talk to each other in jerkish. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak, and because that language would spread rapidly from pole to pole, to the east and the west, it would be the language of the future. "
116 " Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being "
― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
117 " But the sheep had taught him something even more important: that there was a universal language in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time that he was trying to improve things at the shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired. "
118 " The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. "
― C.S. Lewis
119 " Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work. "
― Carl Sandburg
120 " A related notion is that when you really know a language, you think in it. In fact, the brain doesn't think in any language. What people refer to as " thinking in a language" comes from being able to speak more immediately in a language without rehearsing it or translating it from a language one might know better; the spoken thought feels as if it's closer to its source in the brain. "