Language Constraint Quotes

If you know only one language, you're a prisoner, stuck in the tyranny of that one language.

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

To have a specific style is to be poor in speech.

I've done many, many French movies and many, many English movies. I think it frees something when you don't talk in your mother language, but I also think you withdraw something as well. I'm a French actress, and sometimes I speak in English-speaking roles. For me, being an actress was always being a traveler. It goes together.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

Most words evolved as a description of the outside world, hence their inadequacy to describe what is going on inside me.

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

The most advanced minds as well as the least advanced are obliged to use the same words. If we adopt new words, it will be even more difficult - if not impossible - to make ourselves understood. The new man must therefore express himself in conventional language.

No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.

Ram Mohan Roy would have been a greater reformer and Lokmanya Tilak a greater scholar if they had not to start with the handicap of having to think in English and transmit their thoughts chiefly in English.

I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.

I see the wielding of a pronoun as something that can be freeing for some members of society but a shackle to others like myself.

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

When you used to be able to express yourself as an adult in your own language, or as I can do in English, for instance, it's sometimes hard to switch back to very simple talking, like I am forced to do in Finnish. So a real conversation, when I really wanna tell something, I can't do it in Finnish.

A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.

Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. But if one could only strike the ball with sufficient force, with perfect timing, it would perhaps break through the netting, continue on its course, never fall to earth, but go into orbit around the world.

Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom.- Every word is a prejudice.

The dictionary is a closed system in which someone interested in the meaning of a word can go around and around and end up exactly where he started, simply because words are defined in terms of other words, and these, in turn, are defined in terms of still other words.

This belief in the necessity of English training has enslaved us. It has unfitted us for true national service.

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

I have to use the word 'insurgent' because I can't think of a better word right now.