Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Often I am struck in amazement about a word: I suddenly realize that the complete arbitrariness of our language is but a part of the arbitrariness of our own world in general.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord? HAMLET: Words, words, words.

Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.

I definitely do see language serving its users, and when it no longer serves them we need to look for new words.

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound, Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.

Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

The whole world has changed, so you just stay current with the world. There's nothing different in my language of how I say things.

Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.