"Turn your wounds into wisdom."
— Oprah Winfrey

"“Meow” means “woof” in cat. "
— George Carlin

"So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream."
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
— James D. Nicoll

"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."
— Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

"All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.'"
— Marcel Duchamp

"silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Know what you are talking about."
— Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła)

"I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain."
— Jane Wagner (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe)

"I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me."
— Matt Groening

"...profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus)

"We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"I'd hoped the language might come on its own, the way it comes to babies, but people don't talk to foreigners the way they talk to babies. They don't hypnotize you with bright objects and repeat the same words over and over, handing out little treats when you finally say "potty" or "wawa." It got to the point where I'd see a baby in the bakery or grocery store and instinctively ball up my fists, jealous over how easy he had it. I wanted to lie in a French crib and start from scratch, learning the language from the ground floor up. I wanted to be a baby, but instead, I was an adult who talked like one, a spooky man-child demanding more than his fair share of attention.

Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change my goals. I told myself that I'd never really cared about learning the language. My main priority was to get the house in shape. The verbs would come in due time, but until then I needed a comfortable place to hide. "
— David Sedaris

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."
— Roland Barthes

"Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious."
— Alan Moore

"You have to watch your language. People will think you have no fucking class"
— Lani Diane Rich

"It's only words... unless they're true."
— David Mamet

"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."
— Nelson Mandela

"But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words."
— Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South)

"Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control."
— Robert Bringhurst (The Solid Form Of Language: An Essay On Writing And Meaning)

"They can be like the sun, words.
They can do for the heart what light can for a field."
— John of the Cross (The Poems of St. John of the Cross)

"there is [...]
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love"
— Samuel Beckett (Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces)

"Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding."
— Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)

"Language does have the power to change reality. Therefore, treat your words as the mighty instruments they are - to heal, to bring into being, to remove, as if by magic, the terrible violations of childhood, to nurture, to cherish, to bless, to forgive - to create from the whole cloth of your soul, true love.
"
— Daphne Rose Kingma

"What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?"
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

"The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in."
— Dennis Potter

"Humor is a universal lanuage."
— Joel Goodman

"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day."
— Mark Twain

"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 (The Solid Form Of Language: An Essay On Writing And Meaning)

"The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else"
— Gustavo Perez Firmat (Bilingual Blues: Poems, 1981-1994)

"It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to be included, such an arrangement would be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some ancient languages had altered very little and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others had altered much owing to the spreading, isolation, and state of civilisation of the several co-descended races, and had thus given rise to many new dialects and languages. The various degrees of difference between the languages of the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even the only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and recent, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue."
— Charles Darwin

"Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.
"
— William G. Golding

"Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas."
— S.I. Hayakawa

"People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else."
— B.R. Myers

"If there's any interaction between genes and languages, it is often languages that influence genes, since linguistic differences between populations lessen the chance of genetic exchange between them."
— Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

"My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next."
— Grace Paley (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories)

"If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me."
— T.E. Lawrence (Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, 1927)

"An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Sweedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. "
— Edith Wharton

"The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance."
— Barthes Roland (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)