First Language Quotes

#1. We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Adam Gopnik

#2. Touch is the first language we speak.

Stephen Gaskin

#3. Tears are our first language and our last.

Marty Rubin

#4. My first language was shy. It's only by having been thrust into the limelight that I have learned to cope with my shyness.

Al Pacino

#5. The first time I was in Stockholm, everybody was real cordial, but I started having these nightmares that I was being watched by aliens, basically all the time. My theory on it was that it was really, really unnerving to be in a place where English isn't the first language.

Mikky Ekko

#6. English is not my first language.

Zhu Zhu

#7. I speak Swedish, it's my first language. Of course, growing up with Latin American parents from Argentina, I also have some other influences from other cultures. But Sweden is where I feel the most at home.

Jose Gonzalez

#8. Silence is God's first language.

John Of The Cross

#9. You'll hear people say it's racist to test. Folks, it's racist not to test. Because guess who gets shuffled through the system oftentimes? Children whose parents don't speak English as a first language, inner-city kids. It's so much easier to quit on somebody than to remediate.

George W. Bush

#10. Many people are intimidated by doctors ... People also feel stupid when they don't understand what a doctor's talking about the first time around, so they don't ask again. And let's be honest here, people. English is not a doctor's first language.

Erma Bombeck

#11. Gratitude is the heart's first language.

Joey Garcia

#12. My dad is a minister, and my mum is a worker with the less fortunate and the disabled. They're Nigerian natives. Their first language is Yoruba, and their second language is English.

John Boyega

#13. I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.

Miyavi

#14. I am all for the inclusion of foreign cultures, not their omission in our media. Foreign names, brands, and inventions must be allowed to show and to compete in US publications. Today, most foreign words are still banned. And almost 7 billion people whose first language is not English are silenced.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#15. My first language is both English and Spanish. My mom was raised in Los Angeles, so with her we spoke English, but my father was born in Cuba, so with him we spoke Spanish.

Jencarlos Canela

#16. This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#17. My father is Cuban. Spanish was my first language, but I don't speak it that much anymore because I had dyslexia, and in school they work with you only in English. But I'm proud to be Latina, and most people don't know I am.

Bella Thorne

#18. I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all.

Claire-Louise Bennett

#19. God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation.

Thomas Keating

#20. Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Margaret Atwood

#21. I said "it is my first language, my mother tongue, my family, my people, my home; it is my heart, my heart, my heart." No one says any of these things. But they should.

Joanna Brooks

#22. Man's first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade men assembled together, is the cry of nature.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#23. Sign language is my first language. English and Spanish are my second languages. I learned Spanish from my grandparents, sign language from my parents, and English from television.

Jack Jason

#24. Drawing is the first language of the human being before writing. It's a transcription of how the human being sees reality, not reality itself.

Marjane Satrapi

#25. it is not the first language that is all-important, but which language captures the adolescent's imagination when he or she first discovers literature.

Ned Thomas

#26. Physical expression was my first language: Before I was an actor, I was a dancer, an acrobat, a mime and a street performer.

Denis Lavant

#27. The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.

Daryl Gregory

#28. I don't speak Spanish, and I get so much crap for it. Oddly enough, it was the first language I learned, but somehow I lost it throughout the years. I can understand pieces of it, but I don't speak it. I need to speak it. I want to teach my kids Spanish.

Ryan Guzman

#29. Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.

Tanit Phoenix

#30. Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.

Christopher Walken

#31. I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us.

Helen Vendler

#32. French was my first language.

Bob Cousy

#33. Expressing emotion is not so easy. He has to remind himself that English is not her first language. Expressing emotion can be difficult even when the words are familiar.

Elise Valmorbida

#34. Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet.

Niall Ferguson

#35. I grew up in France, my first language was French, and I tend to gravitate towards French cooking.

Robert Stack

#36. If a person calls themself 'autistic' and you tell them they have to use 'person first language' ... you're not putting the person first.

Stuart Duncan

#37. It is through our hands that we speak to the child. That we communicate.
Touch is the child's first language, understanding comes long after feeling

Frederick Leboyer

#38. She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt. I wasn't entirely certain. It wouldn't have mattered, if I had been in Radch space. Radchaai don't care much about gender, and the language they speak - my own first language - doesn't mark gender in any way.

Ann Leckie

#39. Drawing - it's the first language of human beings, before writing, before even talking, before words, human beings was drawing.

Marjane Satrapi

#40. My first language is Gaelic.

Enya

#41. Our parents taught us to love God, love our family and love our country. Their own grandparents were immigrants. Their first language may not have been English, but the hopes and dreams they had for their children were purely American.

Martin O'Malley

#42. Even though many Indians can read or speak English, for most, it is not their first language. At the office, we speak in English, but we consume our culture in our own language.

Amish Tripathi

#43. I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.

Salma Hayek

#44. I studied in American school, so yes, I grew up speaking English and Spanish. Obviously, Spanish is my first language.

Eiza Gonzalez

#45. Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.

Thomas Keating

#46. The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife.

Clive James

#47. Because it's my first language, all the literature that I've read and all the things that I've been inspired by that have been written in Welsh have moved me beyond anything that I've experienced in any other language.

Gwenno

#48. My first language is French. I just love words so much, and in French it feels like I can say whatever I want however I want.

Xavier Dolan

#49. My first language, the true language of the soul spoken only on our planet of origin, had no word for betrayal or traitor. Or even loyalty- because without the opposite, the concept had no meaning.

Stephenie Meyer

#50. I have a handicap in that English is not my first language. So even though I'm a writer, I don't write anymore because it's just harder in English.

Patricia Riggen

#51. It's difficult for me to write in English as it's not my first language, but French is even worse because of my father's influence and because the comparisons that I - not even other people - would make.

Charlotte Gainsbourg

#52. I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.

Helen Oyeyemi

#53. Lyrics are important, but it's hard, because English isn't my first language - although it feels like it is these days! I grew up with amazing melodies, so getting that right on a song has always been the key thing for me, but there's no reason why a great melody doesn't deserve great lyrics.

Avicii

#54. I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.

Louis Begley

#55. I learned Spanish at home and, since half my family doesn't speak English, it's my first language.

Odette Annable

#56. We start our lives with blues ... with music. It's our first language. It's the rhythm of the womb. It's your mama's heartbeat inside your head.

David Mutti Clark

#57. No new reader, however charitable, could open "Fifty Shades of Grey," browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth.

Anthony Lane

#58. I know Spanish pretty well. I'm half-Puerto Rican - my mom is from Puerto Rico - so I have a lot of family there, and my mom's first language is Spanish. But growing up in the States, and with my dad being from the States, I'm kind of just like this white kid.

David Lambert

#59. Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.

Edwin Gaustad

#60. Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in its childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be no polished language without books.

Samuel Johnson

#61. It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

Mark Twain

#62. I think of language as our first music.

Yusef Komunyakaa

#63. Normally, when someone we love is turning away from a struggle, we self-protect by also turning away. That's definitely my first response. I think change is more likely to happen if both partners have common language and a shared lens to see problems.

Brene Brown

#64. It was made clear to me that Music is related to everything, especially nature and language, but in order to speak it naturally, I had to first make myself a part of it.

Victor L. Wooten

#65. First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

Peter Ellis

#66. I look forward to my first visit to Israel. Music is a universal language that is meant to unify audiences in peace and love, and that is the spirit of our show.

Alicia Keys

#67. It doesn't matter what the income level of your family is, or if English is the first or second language. It makes no difference. The bottom line is that every child can be an academic champion, an academic champion and a superstar in academics.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#68. There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.

Eugene H. Peterson

#69. Bill Condon, I must say, may have been one of the best professional experiences of my life, collaborating with him. He, himself, is an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He is a storyteller first and foremost, so we speak the same language. We approach things always from the story.

Melissa Rosenberg

#70. Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship.

Elizabeth McCracken

#71. An old, old formula came to mind, from back when I was very young indeed. "I am a soldier." I said it first in the language I had spoken then, then repeated myself in Sleepy's own Dejagoran dialect. "I've been distracted before. I'm still alive.

Glen Cook

#72. Tengo realized this was the first time he had ever heard anything resembling polite language from Fuka-Eri's mouth. No, it might not have been the first time, but he could not recall when he might have heard it before.

Haruki Murakami

#73. There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than "Cheer up!" The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying "cheer up" had quite the opposite effect, only reminding the person why he or she was depressed in the first place.

Koji Suzuki

#74. When you write your memoir you will understand, perhaps for the first time, the significance of your life through the language, images and emotions you craft from the memory.

Maureen Murdock

#75. But for the first time, Boaz couldn't think of a single word to describe this kind of loneliness, so scary and real it required an entirely different language, new and strange and yet to be invented

Molly Antopol

#76. The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Donna Tartt

#77. Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

Richard Rodriguez

#78. Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.

Bob Dylan

#79. Whenever I write a paragraph in English, I first check it with the Google Translator, and most often it says no language detected.

M.F. Moonzajer

#80. China's cinema has been rising for some time; it has more exposure, so my chances of becoming internationally known are better. But the first thing I have to do is learn English. If I can grasp the language, then perhaps I can think about the U.S.

Ziyi Zhang

#81. I grew up a really nerdy kid. I read science fiction and fantasy voraciously, for the first 16 years of my life. I read a lot of classic Cold War science fiction, which is much of the best science fiction, so I speak the language well, which is a commodity that's not easy to come by in Hollywood.

Jon Spaihts

#82. Like a baby learning language, we learn how to communicate with God by listening to His words first.

Timothy Keller

#83. Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

Franz Kafka

#84. The child's reluctance to speak for the first few months of his residence in a new country is not pathological, but normal.

Stephen D. Krashen

#85. When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It's like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high - you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

Agnes Varda

#86. When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was 'It will be O.K.' I would wonder, 'How the hell is it going to be O.K.?' The worst word in the English language is 'hope.'

Bobby Knight

#87. Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men, sex is the connection. Sex is man's language of intimacy

Esther Perel

#88. Nas' Illmatic blew my mind when I first heard it. The poetry was done on such a high level that in a way, it validated our existence, our culture. He used the language of the street at the time and made it art. Art tends to be validating.

Erik Parker

#89. I am a very simple man. I am a man first, an artist second. My first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow man. I will endeavour to meet this obligation through music, since it transcends language, politics and national boundaries.

Pablo Casals

#90. In every language, the first word after "Mama!" that every kid learns to say is "Mine!" A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say "Mine!" when you grow up, has

Frank Zappa

#91. Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.

Eric Hoffer

#92. When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.

Ben Lerner

#93. Each composer has their own language, and I try to meet the challenges, even if at first sight, they appear impossible.

Michala Petri

#94. For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards.

John Mole

#95. There is as little likelihood of squeezing an adult into the intellectual framework of their childhood as there is into their first pair of pajamas.

Kato Lomb

#96. Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.

Anne Applebaum

#97. Italian was my first foreign language. I speak it better than English.

Iman

#98. It is a gift, and you realize as soon as you cross the border into Paraguay, as I did, the first time in '82, that you are in a sort of wonderland. Nothing is quite right: the buildings, they've got their own architecture, their own language; and everything is just a little bit off key.

John Gimlette

#99. In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Robert Hughes

#100. Should such an ignorant people lead the world? How did it come to this in the first place? 82 percent of us don't even have a passport! Just a handful can speak a language other than English.

Michael Moore