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1 " Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me. "
― Hugo Hamilton , The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood
2 " It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport. "
― Douglas Adams , The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Dirk Gently, #2)
3 " Love has no color, love has no language and love has no religion. "
4 " So runs my dream, but what am I?An infant crying in the nightAn infant crying for the lightAnd with no language but a cry. "
― Alfred Tennyson , In Memoriam
5 " We need no language to laugh "
― Janaki Sooriyarachchi , චන්දු තමී
6 " The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone.Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night's heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and, borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier Presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great Presence, all human life lies like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but angels of God. "
― Jerome K. Jerome , Three Men in a Boat (Three Men, #1)
7 " The pig winks and rolls in the bog. He kicks his legs up and his trotters clack together. The sun is low over the neighbourhood. There is the smell of oncoming night, of pollen settling, the sounds of kids fighting bath time. Lester comes down, waving his hands.Don't drown the pig, Fish. We're saving him for Christmas! We're gonna eat him.No!I'll drink to that, says the pig.Lester stands there. He looks at Fish. He looks at the porker. He peeps over the fence. The pig. The flamin' pig. The pig has just spoken. It's no language that he can understand, but there's no doubt. He feels a little crook, like maybe he should go over to that tree and puke. I like him, Lestah.He talks?Yep.Oh, my gawd.Lester looks at his retarded son again and once more at the pig.The pig talks.I likes him.Yeah, I bet.The pig snuffles, lets off a few syllables: aka sembon itwa. It's tongues, that's what it is. A blasted Pentecostal pig.And you understand him?Yep. I likes him.Always the miracles you don't need. It's not a simple world, Fish. It's not. "
― Tim Winton , Cloudstreet
8 " Why do you consult [women's] words when it is not their mouths that speak? Consult their eyes, their colour, their breathing, their timid manner, their slight resistance, that is the language nature gave them for your answer. The lips always say 'No,' and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie. Has not a woman the same needs as a man, but without the same right to make them known? Her fate would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter. "
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Emile, or On Education
9 " So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, I have no language left at all: the world is not " unreal" (I could then utter it: there are arts of the unreal, among them the greatest arts of all), but disreal: reality has fled from it, is nowhere, so that I no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me; *I do not manage* to define my relations with Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, the Piazza del Popolo. What relation can I have with a system of power if I am neither its slave nor its accomplice nor its witness." —from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_ "
10 " Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life ... "
― J.R.R. Tolkien
11 " Everybody pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning. "
12 " Whenever I write a paragraph in English, I first check it with the Google Translator, and most often it says no language detected. "
― M.F. Moonzajer , LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
13 " I have no language to paint the horrors of our situation. To shed tears was indeed altogether unavailing and withal unmanly yet I was not able to deny myself the relief they served to afford me. "
14 " The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing. "
― Toni Morrison
15 " And yet it seems so full of comfort and of strength, the night. In its great presence, our small sorrows creep away, ashamed. The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained face upto hers, and smiles, and though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone.Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night's heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great presence, all human life's like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but the angels of God. "
― Jerome K. Jerome
16 " I endured all our hardships as if they had been luxuries: I made light of scurvy, banqueted off train-oil, and met that cold for which there is no language framed, and which might be a new element; or which, rather, had seemed in that long night like the vast void of ether beyond the uttermost star, where was neither air nor light nor heat, but only bitter negation and emptiness. I was hardly conscious of my body; I was only a concentrated search in myself. "
― Harriet Prescott Spofford , The Moonstone Mass and Others
17 " sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning "
― Jane Austen , Sense and Sensibility
18 " There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting. "
19 " Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along. "