Grace Paley Quotes

If you love language, it will love you back.

I was never much of a reader. I'm a slow reader, which is unusual, because I'm so into language and I love words so much. But it's hard for me to read.

I fell in love with words and I think that made my mom smile. I think that was cool for her.

I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.

You should take notes whenever you hear interesting or original language.

I love words.

I was also in love with the English language.

I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this.

No matter where we live, we have to use words. Once you've been looking into words, their stories, it's easy to fall in love with them.

My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I've passed it on to my children.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

I realized over the years if I'm writing about humor, irony, satire, I much prefer to do that in English. And if there is sorrow, melancholy, longing, I much prefer to do that in Turkish. Each language has its own strength to me, and I feel connected and attached to both Turkish and English. I dream in more than one language.

The fact is I do feel very Spanish, like when I'm talking to my wife and daughter in Spanish at two in the afternoon. I even think in Spanish when I get angry!

You have to be mad in the language you're mad in.

Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet. It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones: The history of how you felt.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.

One of the most frustrating words in the human language, as far as I could tell, was love. So much meaning attached to this one little word. People bandied it about freely, using it to describe their attachments to possessions, pets, vacation destinations, and favorite foods. In the same breath they then applied this word to the person they considered most important in their lives. Wasn’t that insulting? Shouldn’t there be some other term to describe deeper emotion?

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for.

With music, you can create instant trust with an audience. You can hear three notes, and you surrender to it, whereas it takes you about ten minutes of language before people begin to trust you in a play.

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

I don't speak anything fluently, but I love picking up languages and I do this Duolingo app. I started when I moved to Sweden, when I was about 19, 20. I really loved the language; it was super melodic and really sexy.

English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it