Language Confusion Quotes

Why is it upset? Shouldn't it be downset?

The whole world is nothing but a noise, as hot as the inside of a tiger's mouth. They call it civilization - that is a lie! But some day you may have to go out, someone will try to take you out, and you will not understand them or what they are saying, unless you understand nothing, absolutely nothing, then you will manage.

I don't speak French, but I took it for five years growing up. So, if I were in a situation where I had to be, like, 'Excuse me, pineapple dog house red, what time is it library?' - no problem.

What [Franz] Kafka says about the Tower of Babel: In the beginning there were actually many languages, and then as a punishment God gave the world a single language. And then they stopped understanding each other.

In Spain, attempting to obtain a chicken salad sandwich, you wind up with a dish whose name, when you look it up in your Spanish-English dictionary, turns out to mean: Eel with big abcess.

But all this language gotten, and augmented by Adam and his posterity, was again lost at the tower of Babel , when by the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion, with an oblivion of his former language.

I cut the ribbon in Paris, and everyone in Paris speaks French — maybe you knew that. But I'm from Tennessee, and Tennessee girls don't speak French. So suddenly I'm stuck onstage with Minnie and Mickey and everyone is yelling at me in French — I guess they're telling me to get off the stage, but I didn't know what they were saying at the time, so I start dancing with Minnie and Mickey like on the show and finally my aunt comes and gets me off.

German? I don't know what that means ... we don't say that in America.

When all men were of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven, but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave every one his peculiar language; and for this reason it was that the city was called Babylon.

I noticed that there are no B batteries. I think that's to avoid confusion, cause if there were you wouldn't know if someone was stuttering. 'Yes, hello I'd like some b-batteries.' 'What kind?' 'B-batteries.' 'What kind?' 'B-batteries!' and D-batteries that's hard for foreigners. 'Yes, I would like de batteries.'

My Finnish, it never really happened, but I'm good in Swedish.

Help!!!! Why is Wednesday spelled like that?!!!!

The first time I went to Wales I thought I'd landed in a land of hobbits. Everybody was really small and the houses were small and the writing was backwards.

He sucked his lips in an attempt not to laugh. "Aren't you Spanish?" She raised one arm in a salute. "Viva la Queen Isabella!" "I see. Then why are you speaking with a French accent?

When you arrive in L.A. as an Englishman, you might as well be on the moon. People just don't understand you if you speak too fast, and most people there think you're Australian. Ordering was incredibly complicated. I was speechless.

I speak English with my dad and Swedish with my mom; it's quite schizophrenic.

It's a complicated process being so bilingual. Sometimes it's a mere word or sentence that comes to me, if I'm writing the book in English, in French. It's not always easy to deal with. Sometimes even during an interview somebody can ask me a question in English that I want to answer in French and vice versa - that's the story of my life!

Instead of this confusion, we need the unifying force of an official language, English, which is the language of success in America.

Cursive writing does not mean what I think it does.

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.

Sometimes I don't use the words 'will' and 'want' in the right way. The German word 'will' is the English word 'want,' so that's a little bit of the problem.

What language are you talking in now? It appears to be bollocks.

It was a long time before I understood what the word 'specific' was. I remember being a kid and thinking it was 'pacific,' and being like, 'Can you be more pacific?' And I believed that for maybe five, six years until someone was like, 'It's 'specific.''

I have only so many foreign-language neurons. When I learned Spanish, that displaced whatever Irish was left, and then I learned German, and that displaced the Spanish, and when I learned Serbo-Croatian, that displaced the German. So I'm a bit of a muddle.