Mary Pipher Quotes

Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.

Sometimes I am a different character in different languages. I have different enjoyment from them. Sometimes different answers come out of me. Like, I didn't even know that about me. I get to know myself through different languages, actually.

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

Being able to incorporate my language into songs is really cool. It's really cool to see that people are susceptible to it. It helps with writing a lot to turn off one language and then go to another.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

My homeland is the portuguese language.

Having an international voice is not really about whether we speak Persian or any other language.

Our language is the reflection of ourselves.

We live in a world filled with language. Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human community. Writers are either polluters or part of the clean-up team. Just as the language of power and greed has the potential to destroy us, the language of reason and empathy has the power to save us. Writers can inspire a kinder, fairer, more beautiful world, or invite selfishness, stereotyping, and violence. Writers can unite people or divide them.

The world has wanted me to speak differently than I speak. You know, I speak like my mom; I speak like, you know, like the whitest white dude; I speak like a Def Comedy Jam comedian doing an impression of a white guy.

I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.

Every man prays in his own language.

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in what he creates.

Sydney: I like Latin. It's fun. Eddie: I can't believe you think we're the strange ones.

Man is but the place where I stand.

And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget--the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature.

Language is our way of communicating what we want and who we are.

Your voice sounds completely different in different languages. It alters your personality somehow. I don't think people get the same feeling from you. The rhythm changes. Because the rhythm of the language is different, it changes your inner rhythm and that changes how you process everything.

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

Words are so awesome. Words are containers for power. They carry either creative power or destructive power.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

Language is also a place of struggle.