Penelope Lively Quotes

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it.

Words of the world are the life of the world.

Only where there is language is there world.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

Words are the tools of 'to be' - of expression. They are completely built on the fact that you 'are,' and in order to express it, you have built a little alphabet, and you make your words from it.

Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before everything and which makes it possible to share everything.

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.

My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

The older I grow the more I become certain that it makes no difference what words we use to tell the same truths.

Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.

We live and breathe words.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

Language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

Being that can be understood is language.

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

Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.

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

Language is the most elementary aspect to our humanness, probably. In addition to that, it's the embodiment, it's the apotheosis of the human experience, it's the way we summarize ourselves.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.