Dead Language Quotes

#1. Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide.

David Kyuman Kim

#2. In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.

Henry David Thoreau

#3. A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

William Hazlitt

#4. Latin is already a dead language, man ... don't make it any deader.

Jerry Scott

#5. I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

Adrienne Rich

#6. My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties. I feel sometimes as if I have spent a large part of my life learning a dead language that no one I know can speak.

Anne Fadiman

#7. Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking parents.' The Director interrupted himself. 'You know what Polish is, I suppose?' 'A dead language.

Aldous Huxley

#8. Of course they won't bloody remember, they'll be dead.' Then she called him a name in a dead language that translated, roughly, to 'poop on a stick,' but sounded more succinct, like this: 'Of course they won't bloody remember, they'll be dead, Poopstick.

Christopher Moore

#9. Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you still have a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey.

Henry David Thoreau

#10. Would have. Could have. Should have. This is the language of condemnation underscored by the passivity of regret. It's a dead language. The thing is, you can't un-sin. You can only repent.

Steven Furtick

#11. I should think a dead language would be rather boring, socially
speaking.

Sol Luckman

#12. Better than chanting a thousand words in a dead language is one soothing word spoken in the vernacular.

Gautama Buddha

#13. The man of science, who is not seeking for expression but for a fact to be expressed merely, studies nature as a dead language.
I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant.

Henry David Thoreau

#14. My body is a dead language and you pronounce each word perfectly.

Sierra DeMulder

#15. There is no such thing as a dead language, only a dead lay that's a little too quiet for my tastes.

Scott Jonathan Nixon

#16. Language is decanted and shared. If only one person is left alive speaking a language - the case with some American Indian languages - the language is dead. Language takes two and their multiples.

Rita Mae Brown

#17. My love translated sounds like a dead language.

Salma Deera

#18. All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#19. Immensely clever and libidinously hilarious.The most astonishing thing about Love in a Dead Language is its ingenious construction. Insofar as any printed volume can lay claim to being a multimedia work, this book earns that distinction.

Paul Di Filippo

#20. You're a dead language, you know that? No one is like you, and you are like no one.

Tarryn Fisher

#21. When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language - or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up.

Allen Lacy

#22. Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.

Jean Dubuffet

#23. I pointed at Ascanio. Not another word. Latin is a dead language, but that doesn't mean you get to molest its corpse. Finish sweeping, ianitor.

Ilona Andrews

#24. It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.

Charles Caleb Colton

#25. Joke exchanges are carried on in deadly earnest, like a verbal duel-mouth-to-mouth combat. Bang, bang: you're (linguistically) dead.

David Crystal

#26. He thinks my hair smells like spring rain. I'm really trying to remain stoic and unaffected. I remind myself that I don't like poetic language. I don't like poetry. I don't even like people who like poetry.
But I'm not dead inside either.

Nicola Yoon

#27. The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

Jacques Derrida

#28. Although I could lament in the language and feelings of David for Absalom, I am constrained to say, peace to his manes. Let us weep for the living, and not for the dead.

Andrew Jackson

#29. I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality - talk, footsteps, slamming doors - which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.

Donna Tartt

#30. The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.

Patrick Kavanagh

#31. What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

T. S. Eliot

#32. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.

Henry David Thoreau

#33. During my tenure at the Endowment, I often found that those who did us the most damage did so under the justification of helping us by 'preventing worse language.' In the military it would be called friendly fire. One ends up just as dead.

John Frohnmayer

#34. More Latin? I was going to need a fucking guidebook to keep track of a language I thought was as dead as my mother.

T.J. Klune

#35. On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone, gone, they rasped. Here was a dead world learning to speak in dissonant, unbearable sounds.

Barbara Kingsolver

#36. Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.

John McGahern

#37. The only ones who have been silenced forever are the dead. The rest, even in the distance, still remain sons of the fatherland, keeping its memory alive and ennobling our language with their words.

Maria Duenas

#38. A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

Lev S. Vygotsky

#39. Thought is a dead end; language is a merry-go-round.

Marty Rubin

#40. Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

Jeanette Winterson

#41. We can choose to move with God, further into justice and wholeness, or we can choose to prop up the world's dead systems, baptizing injustice and power in sacred language.

Sarah Bessey

#42. I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried.

Douglas Hyde

#43. The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Robert Morgan

#44. Don't speak to them in the language of the dead, Mr. Marinville.

Stephen King

#45. No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#46. I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

Shirley Jackson

#47. Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

Stanley Fish

#48. Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?

Henry Ward Beecher

#49. I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native language.

John Dryden

#50. The communication/of the dead is tongued with fire beyond/the language of the living
The Little Gidding

T. S. Eliot

#51. The only languages which do not change are dead ones.

David Crystal

#52. Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

Cyril Connolly

#53. His soul,the only fire in a frozen river,spoke up and identified the sound as the Language of the Dead.

Rebecca Hill

#54. Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same ...

Elizabeth Bowen

#55. If there's one thing consistent about language it is that it is constantly changing. The only languages that do not change are those whose speakers are dead.

Rosalie Maggio

#56. Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.

Willa Cather

#57. Latin is a dead tongue
And Romans made songs!
Then no one disagree:
It delighted them in theory
Now it's "the Latin" in me.

Ana Claudia Antunes

#58. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are many Aramaic texts from the time of Jesus, so one can get a pretty good idea of what the language of Jesus looked liked.

Jay Parini

#59. Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: "The King is dead" and "Jesus wept."

Bill Moyers

#60. A whipper-snapper of criticism who quoted dead languages to hide his ignorance of life.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree

#61. The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand ... We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.

Jean Cocteau

#62. The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.

Russell Baker