#language

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#english-language #french #time #death

Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers). How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around). What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#death #languages #polyglots #questionnaires #talents

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#decadence #decadent #illusion #language #literature

Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element. ↗

— Søren Kierkegaard

#language #art

As a matter of fact, a national language which spreads beyond its own confines very quickly loses much of its original richness of content and is in no better case than a constructed language. ↗

— Edward Sapir

#beyond #case #confines #constructed #content

The spirit of logical analysis should in practice blend with the practical pressure for the adoption of some form of international language, but it should not allow itself to be stampeded by it. ↗

— Edward Sapir

#allow #analysis #blend #form #international

After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country. ↗

— Hu Shih

#began #chinese #chinese people #contacts #country

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past. ↗

— Andrzej Wajda

#anchors #consequently #in the past #know #language

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language. ↗

— Muriel Barbery

#language #reading #beauty

When I'm on TV, I'm often talking to a conservative host. I may have another conservative arguing with me. You've got very limited time, and you're using 'sound-bite' type language. ↗

— Juan Williams

#arguing #conservative #got #host #i