David Lodge Quotes

We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.

It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts; for words, which are given us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought.

Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the knowledge, customs, and values of those around them."

Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers.

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

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

Language is generated by the intellect and generates the intellect.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

Was it really so far-fetched to think that words had a way of shaping a person's whole life?

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

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

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.

No matter how much more I practice, my English will never be perfect. If it is really terrible, I'll correct it, but otherwise, I do it my Jackie Chan way.

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

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.

‎Perfect? How can you define a word without concrete meaning?

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.

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.