Language Failure Quotes

When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

I'm interested in when language fails, when it is opaque.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

When a tongue fails to send forth appropriate shafts, there might be a word to act as healer of these.

Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.

I failed world geography, civics, Spanish and English. And when you fail Spanish and English, they do not consider you bilingual. They may call you bi-ignorant because you can't speak any language.

I'm terrible at languages. I'm trying to learn Spanish. I tried to learn French as a kid.

There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes.

Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence

I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.

I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation.

I love language, and I love the failure of language.

I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

My father's really fluent in French, but I can't speak at all. I actually took it twice in school already and failed both times!

You know, I'd forget words and start just singing noises.

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.

Words fall short sometimes.

The phrasing didn't work as well.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words and not one of them can save me.