#lang

A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth. In approaching literature, it has aimed at restoring to the word its magical qualities. And at giving back to language the elemental power it once had within society. This determinism lies at the heart of the surrealist attitude and distinguishes it radically from the modernism which took shape contemporaneously with it. ↗

— Michael Richardson

#literature #magic #modernism #myth #surrealism

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened. ↗

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

#current #heightened #language #poetical #should

They are damn good projects - excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there - God damn it! ↗

— Harry Hopkins

#damn #dumb #dumb people #excellent #foreign

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play. ↗

— Carol Ann Duffy

#able #century #connect #deep #deep way

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow. ↗

— Richard Mitchell

#language #thinking #thought #attitude

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. ↗

— Andrea Dworkin

#both #every #fused #heralds #into

Language is much closer to film than painting is. ↗

— Sergei Eisenstein

#film #language #much #painting #than

I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I’ll still be questing after just that right combination of words. ↗

— Lauren Willig

#wordsmithing #writing #beauty

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. ↗

— Paul Engle

#blooded #delicate #emotions #held #ideas

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#beat #cracked #dance #kettle #language