Lady Gregory Quotes

In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm.

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

If you listen to a language for 15 minutes, you know the rhythm and song.

I don't hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don't read a lot of literature and not care about language.

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.

I think moving from Ireland to Australia, you couldn't get a more different accent on the palate. The Irish accent is very muscular and involves a lot of tongue and cheek-muscle work, whereas the Australian accent is really flat; the palate is quite broad. They're at almost opposite ends of the scale, so I feel it was good training.

Accents are interesting, because they very often inform the way a person moves.

Every language has its own music.

I'm very aware when I'm speaking to the English of how flat my Mid-Atlantic American voice is.

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

I'm not trying to stump anybody... it's the beauty of the language that I'm interested in.

I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.

I have a funny accent in every language.

The fact that that's the difference between Mexicans and Cubans is pronounced. It's so immediately recognizable, the way a Cuban speaks, the way a Cuban moves the hands.

If I go anywhere where there are people who vaguely look like me, there is always that feeling of, 'Actually I do look quite similar to everyone else.' At moments like that, I become very, very British. My accent gets more clipped, and I stride around as if I've got an empire.

The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.

Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish.

My mom used to call me a parrot, because the way I spoke would change in every country we'd go to.

I can hardly understand the Australian accent.

Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It's a rhythm thing - people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.

Trinidad's language is a fusion of English, African, and French, and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary. Steupse is a common local word, and it's the onomatopoeic word for the sound people make to show disapproval, or to show they are vexed, when they suck their teeth together.

The way I think or sing about something is very different if it is in Spanish or English.

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.