#language

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. ↗

— Edith Wharton

#music #paradox #understanding #age

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#reading #age

BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#humor #languages #poison #beauty

Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history. ↗

— Russell Hoban

#effort #history #human #human effort #language

I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working. ↗

— Alice Hoffman

#escape #find #get #i #into

The form language used by the ancient Egyptians in their structures is minimal. ↗

— Harry Seidler

#egyptians #form #language #minimal #structures

Arabs respect only the language of force. ↗

— Moshe Sharett

#force #language #only #respect

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#approach #book #characters #completely #diction

It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish. ↗

— Douglas Hyde

#brought #disgraceful #everything #institutions #irish

The Actor, noticing a closed bookshop, dismounted from the horse which he tied to a street lamp. He woke up the bookseller and bought a Spanish grammar and dictionary. He set out again across town marveling at the way that the words of the foreign language were freshly gathered fruits and not old and dry. They touched the senses marvelously, new like young beggars who accost you, not yet words but the every things they designate, happily running naked before being clothed again in abstraction. ↗

— Georges Limbour

#words #design