#language

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#language #design

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. ↗

— Muriel Barbery

#speech #writing #beauty

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere. ↗

— Edmund de Waal

#languages #travel #art

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event. ↗

— Theodore Bikel

#art #battles #cares #comes #down

Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world. ↗

— Augustine Birrell

#books #course #five #forward #given

For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity. ↗

— Christopher Dawson

#appeals #blood #class #common #common language

The language of my books has shaped me as a man. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#language #man #me #shaped

Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals. ↗

— Walt Disney

#animation #caricature #cartoon #develop #different

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else. ↗

— B.R. Myers

#grammar #language #grammar

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing. ↗

— John H. McWhorter

#grammar