Rebecca Solnit Quotes

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.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

We must plow through the whole of language.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

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

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

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

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.

You can't eat language but it eases thirst.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Language is froth on the surface of thought.

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.