Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

Today, there are over 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world. They may sound different, but in every case, they're drawing on the same regions of the brain. If you had told me that stone-tool-making had something to do with our ability to speak, I would have said you've got rocks in your head, but the latest studies indicate that once Homo erectus got creative with stone, our brains were on the way to inventing the most powerful tool of all: language.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.

The sentences in the book of providence are sometimes long, and you must read a great way before you understand their meaning.

Euphemisms, like fashions, have their day and pass, perhaps to return at another time. Like the guests at a masquerade ball, they enjoy social approval only so long as they retain the capacity for deception.

Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. "I hate this language. It changes too often!

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

A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last finds an out in narration one day. That's a supreme joy. And why the characters keep showing up.

Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.

We are at a time in our country's history that inclusive language is better than exclusive language.

We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.

Nor can one word be chang'd but for a worse.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find?

The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.