Language Imperfection Quotes

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

Why' is a crooked letter and can't be made straight.

I realized how Latina I was, and then also, at the same time, how not Latina enough I was, because I'm born and raised in Los Angeles. I speak Spanish, but I don't speak perfect Spanish, not like a native speaker.

No matter how much more I practice, my English will never be perfect. If it is really terrible, I'll correct it, but otherwise, I do it my Jackie Chan way.

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.

I don't speak ... I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

Words are a pretty blunt instrument. There's always going to be slippage between the words and the infinite complexities of a thought. As a writer, I find that frustrating, but as a social animal, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Although no one loves a typo, it's close to impossible to eradicate every single little mistake in a manuscript.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

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

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.

The charge of being ambiguous and indefinite may be brought against every human composition, and necessarily arises from the imperfection of language. Perhaps no two men will express the same sentiment in the same manner and by the same words; neither do they connect precisely the same ideas with the same words.

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.