Amy Tan Quotes

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Language is very deceiving. In certain languages, there is certain vocabulary that doesn't exist in other languages. It totally changes how people feel about things.

I thought the whole world was like Lorain.

What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

For us, we are all very different, our languages are very different, and our societies are very different. But if we could extract ourselves from our point of view and sort of look down at human life the way a biologist looks at other organisms, I think we could see it a different way.

This sign I give you: every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights.

I'm not religious, and I feel that has to do with me being uprooted so many times in my life that I've explored many religions and sentiments from many different families basically across the globe.

There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.

You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it.

One of the interesting things about having an international fanbase is that every single country has a different reaction to you and to the movie.

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

Africa. There are a gazillion different languages people speak there, different bone structures, so vast and different.

But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.

Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate.

People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.

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

Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.

If it is true that if you believe in something, you manifest it, there are many Jesus Christs in the universe, because there are many different cultural interpretations of Jesus.

Everyone has his food, and his time of life is reckoned. Their tongues are separate in speech, And their natures as well; Their skins are distinguished, As thou distinguishest the foreign peoples. Thou makest a Nile in the underworld, Thou bringest forth as thou desirest to maintain the people according as thou madest them for thyself, The lord of all of them, wearying with them, The lord of every land, rising for them, The Aton of the day, great of majesty.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.

The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can't both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn't fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best will in the world, he will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction.