Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

When you used to be able to express yourself as an adult in your own language, or as I can do in English, for instance, it's sometimes hard to switch back to very simple talking, like I am forced to do in Finnish. So a real conversation, when I really wanna tell something, I can't do it in Finnish.

I think there is a misunderstanding about Indians' traditional views. India did send army into Goa, India did send an army into and fought a war in Kashmir in 1948, India did get Hyderabad by force... I think the narrow projection on the international... arena distorted India's image.

With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.

I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.

I think you always feel braver in another language.

When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?

It would be a sad day for India if it has to inherit the English scale and the English tastes so utterly unsuitable to the Indian environment.

However virile the English language may be, it can never become the language of the masses of India.

What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

I think the most annoying language is a tie between all the ones I don't know how to speak.

If you know only one language, you're a prisoner, stuck in the tyranny of that one language.

He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

I can hardly believe that I even know this, but I am aware that Noah Webster's original dictionary, apart from being the first truly American lexicography, was a kind of line in the sand. It claimed a very discrete, American form of the English language, explicitly to compare it to the English of our erstwhile colonial masters who had been operating under Dr. Johnson's dictionary rules for well over a century.

A good work can be communicated across languages ... [provided one does not] fall into the trap of narrow-minded nationalistic or chauvinistic thinking.

Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.

She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

The problem with the British film industry is that it's really the American film industry, or a small branch of in lots of ways because of the common language. But it's great to see some individual voices still there. I think I probably gravitate towards a slightly more European, auteur model rather than the studio thing. I think it would be great if British films were a little bit more auteur driven.

A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

The British fans are liable to suddenly be talking to you about something that you don't know how you got into the conversation. I think it's something to do with the fact that they've been watching you for so many years sort of you telling your story.

When you talk and think of the Absolute, you have to do it in the relative; so all these logical arguments apply.

I've shot films in Africa. I've shot in America - English is not my language.