#language

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. ↗

— Amy Tan

#concepts #daughters #family #fear #heritage

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind. ↗

— Teresa Jordan

#words #family

I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happiness was defined by upwardly mobile consumerism, Kerouac etched a different existence and he wrote in an original language. ↗

— Sterling Lord

#language #writing #home

Humor is a universal lanuage. ↗

— Joel Goodman

#language #universal #humor

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#inspirational #language #virginia-woolf #writing-philosophy #inspirational

It is wrong to use equal language for unequal actions. ↗

— Peter Akinola

#equal #language #unequal #use #wrong

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#pessimism #philosophy #rhetoric #intelligence

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs ↗

— Stephen Fry

#education

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life. ↗

— Charles Scribner, Jr.

#commonplace #cultivated #essential #everyday #everyday life

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#importance #language #words #life