Top 89 Language Play Quotes
#2. I don't remember consciously not being able to play an instrument. It's been kind of like a language for me.
Kristian Bush
#3. Everything I ever valued before this was valued only because it was useless, because time spent upon it was not demanded but freely given, because to play is to be free. Free is not a word that exists here, I think, in their language. Nothing here is free of its own nature, its own law.
David Malouf
#4. I am not musically educated yet. I don't read - I make my own language that works for myself. But I play by ear.
Imelda May
#5. Joke exchanges are carried on in deadly earnest, like a verbal duel-mouth-to-mouth combat. Bang, bang: you're (linguistically) dead.
David Crystal
#6. Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#7. And a beautiful garden, not far from a beautiful lake, and I said it sounded perfectly perfect.
Vladimir Nabokov
#8. Films, fiction, can encompass a whole global vision on a particular subject with any story, whatever it is. You can play the story in whatever country with whatever language in whatever style you want to tell the story in.
Gael Garcia Bernal
#9. Music is in the connection of human souls, speaking a language that needs no words. Everyone joins a band in this life. And what you play always affects someone. Sometimes, it affects the world. Frankie's
Mitch Albom
#10. Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.
Jack Prelutsky
#11. I tell my students, 'It's an important tradition and you have to go back and hear this music and learn its language all the way through. How are you going to know what's new to play, if you haven't listened to everything that's old?'
Jackie McLean
#12. Language is a door. Words en-trance and are an entrance; they draw you in. When you read, the book you cradle disappears and the tales within unfold in your mind. Writing is a shelter of words and reading an interior adventure.
Laurie Seidler
#13. Basketball doesn't care what color your skin is. It doesn't care what language you speak or what religion you practice. It doesn't care if you're big or small, fast or slow. It just asks you to play, to complete, to lose with dignity, to win humility.
Jim Calhoun
#14. I like to flip through play scripts, not just my own; there is something exciting about seeing printed language on a page that triggers responses in me.
Donald Margulies
#15. My plays have been translated into all of the official languages of South Africa except Afrikaans.
Zakes Mda
#16. It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that ... [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.
Julian Barnes
#17. We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.
Niels Bohr
#18. It's more than usually possible that I won't do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it's a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world.
Bill Nighy
#19. If I program 'ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it," Scile said. "If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it's only sound, and that's not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.
China Mieville
#20. I think, in many ways, certain people sought me out maybe because they liked my body language or they liked the way I wore a slit skirt, the way I cross my legs or carry my purse. It's quite inspiring to play the seduction card.
Carine Roitfeld
#21. What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.
Steve Wozniak
#22. Numbers are really fascinating things, and they do play a big part in our lives. They are a language of their own.
Kate Bush
#23. I used to hate England because they ruled my country but I am happy they gave us the game of cricket, which they can't play very well, and the English language, which I can't speak very well,
Kapil Dev
#24. It's funny - I was a big fan of 'The Sopranos.' It became kind of a threat to 'The X-Files' in a way because they could play with language, character, and story in ways that we never could because of the limitations of network television.
Chris Carter
#25. PANTOMIME, n. A play in which the story is told without violence to the language. The least disagreeable form of dramatic action.
Ambrose Bierce
#26. There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds. But the ability to play non-zero-sum games was another watershed.
Jonathan Haidt
#27. The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.
Albert Einstein
#28. When you play somebody, you pick up a lot of their gestures, his voice, the way he speaks, his body language. You don't often get that opportunity.
Robert Loggia
#29. When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language.
Salman Rushdie
#30. The operas I listen to aren't in English, and I want to listen to my opera after I'm done with it. I want to have the desire to play it on the stereo. To me, the language is part of the mystery.
Rufus Wainwright
#31. The luster of an experience can actually go up with time. So, learning to play a new instrument, learning a new language - those sorts of things will pay dividends for years or decades to come.
Dan Buettner
#32. My mother's journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth. Without a shadow there is no substance. If we have no shadow, it means we are invisible. As long as I have a shadow, I am alive.
Terry Tempest Williams
#33. All the things you put off, like learning to play the piano or leaning a different language? You're like, what's the point? I'm not really gonna do that, am I?
Leslie Mann
#34. Play with your physical workplace in a way that sends positive "body language" to employees and visitors.
Tom Kelley
#35. Her German language made my arteries harden-
I've no annuity for the play we blew.
I chartered an aluminum canoe,
I had her six times in the English Garden.
Robert Lowell
#36. I am lucky that the Western world chooses me to play roles in their movies an television, whatever language it may be.
Irrfan Khan
#37. My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers.
David Henry Hwang
#38. That's why so many people want to play Hamlet: because it's a completely demarked role, and the actor playing it has to be prepared, through the language, to allow the audience to see into who he is.
Cate Blanchett
#39. It's one thing to just play a tune, or play a program of music, but it's another thing to practically create a new language of music, which is what Kind of Blue did.
Chick Corea
#40. A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics.
Zephyr Teachout
#41. Regardless of your marital status, your age, or the language you speak, you are a beloved spirit daughter of Heavenly Father who is destined to play a critical part in the onward movement of the gospel kingdom.
Sheri L. Dew
#42. There was no language barrier when it came to kids, and when it came to play.
Connie Sellecca
#43. Never underestimate the role pretension plays when it comes to creating euphemistic language.
George Carlin
#44. There's an unspoken language when Gus and I play together. It's always been that way. We hear and feel music the same way. Communication flows back and forth through the music, one reacting to and feeding off the other. Words are spoken with eyes and subtle nods.
Kim Holden
#45. I just bought two balls which remind me for the Dr.House ball. The ball which he used to play, however I bought one book by Stephen King translated on Bulgarian language it's called Finder Keepers!
Deyth Banger
#46. The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought
Albert Einstein
#47. I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.
Anne Stevenson
#48. I've been lucky with the circle of people I'm playing with. We've played enough that there's a language we talk with each other when we play.
Bill Frisell
#49. Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists,
Yann Martel
#50. The instrumental pieces are compositions, certainly, although that's not the language that I instinctively use. They're not scored, and arrangements are often arrived at collaboratively. I always choose to play with people whose input I desire.
David Grubbs
#51. English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.
Yael Naim
#52. Some version of 'Deal or No Deal' airs in 120 countries. And they play it exactly the same way, with models and briefcases. It crosses language and culture and gender, because it's the simplest game in the world, and everyone wants to press their luck.
Howie Mandel
#53. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Theodore Bikel
#54. I like to play with someone who can cover a lot of ground and someone with whom you can discuss the language at a reasonable level; otherwise it gets a bit frustrating.
Andy Summers
#55. He loved Noah's combination of reticence and curiosity. His too-formal language hid a major sexy beast waiting to be let out to play. And Adrian was just the guy to uncage it.
Annabeth Albert
#56. Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.
Jean Genet
#57. I always knew Fitz would wind up writing; although I figured he'd be a poet or a storyteller. He would play with language the way other children played with stones and twigs, building structures for the rest of us to decorate with our imagination.
Jodi Picoult
#58. All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.
Richard Foreman
#59. English is only a weak second language, so that the third language
which at the moment is getting the most play, since French is what I speak, read, and hear almost 24/7
is trying to take over the no. 2 spot.
Apol Lejano-Massebieau
#60. In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.
Russell Baker
#61. If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.
A.A. Milne
#62. Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.
Jay Griffiths
#63. My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.
Elfriede Jelinek
#64. You always try to play it off cool, but even if I think I have a certain laidback body language when I'm meeting someone who I greatly admire, I still have this horrible tendency to go bright red.
Rose Leslie
#65. Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
Marshall McLuhan
#66. I've been writing plays since the third grade. The biggest difference now is that professionals act in them rather than eight year olds ... and the language is a bit more "colorful".
Colette Freedman
#67. I just watched so many Westerns as a kid that you end up using archetypes and sort of tropes of that genre, because there's a language there and you can twist it and turn it on its head or play to it or go sideways at any time.
Gore Verbinski
#68. 'Rednecks' always made me nervous to play, but I'm glad I wrote it and I continue to play it. It's just that the language is so rough.
Randy Newman
#70. In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#71. Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that's thrilling. That's when my pen flies.
Laura Wade
#72. Language is play to most writers, thoughts are play.
Stephen King
#73. Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.
Helen Vendler
#74. As with Cesc Fabregas, some players who go and play for foreign clubs improve on a cultural level. It makes them grow on many levels; intellectually, because you have to learn a new language and adapt to another culture, and on a footballing level too.
Vicente Del Bosque
#75. When the American people look at the political process play out, they hear all the spinning and all the doctrinaire language, and they still walk away with the belief that they're not being represented in Congress, that there's no trust in the executive branch.
David Gregory
#76. I write because I love to play with language.
W. H. Auden
#77. The word "robot" comes from the 1920 Czech play R.U.R. by playwright Karel Capek ("robot" means "drudgery" in the Czech language and "labor" in Slovak).
Michio Kaku
#78. In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.
Charles Simic
#79. In the context of fiercely monolingual dominant cultures like that of the United States, code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language...Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word play, and games of rhythm and rhyme.
Mary Louise Pratt
#80. Me neither," Shane put in. "Homie don't play that."
"I wonder, sometimes, if your generation speaks English at all," Amelie said.
Rachel Caine
#81. Telugu-Tamil producer Thyagarajan has bought the South Indian language rights for two Hindi hit films, Vikas Behl's 'Queen' and Neeraj Pandey's 'Special 26.' He wants me to play Akshay Kumar's role in the Telugu version of 'Special 26.' Akshay and I even look similar, physique-wise.
Ravi Teja
#82. He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language.
Patti Smith
#83. I've just done a film in the United States. It's a thriller called 'A Crime', with Harvey Keitel, we play against each other, and it's so great to play in another language. But I'm definitely not American.
Emmanuelle Beart
#84. The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language ... it's language as play.
Carol Ann Duffy
#85. They who from birth have had no other speech than the trembling of their lips learn a language of the eyes, endless in expression, deep as the sea, clear as the heavens, wherein play dawn and sunset, light and shadow. The dumb have a lonely grandeur like Nature's own. Wherefore
Rabindranath Tagore
#86. The beauty of a language is, generally judged by its soft or rigid, melodious or harsh, ring. Other aspects, such as the flexibility of derivation, play hardly any role in grading. Were it the case, Russian would certainly be placed on the winner's stand. It would rank first in plasticity.
Kato Lomb
#87. I want to create a kind of new monster language for kids to play with, pick up, and incorporate into their own vocabularies.
Harry Knowles
#88. Pam replied that she was too old to worry about being cool, but in fact she did worry about it, and that's one reason it was always nice to see Bobby, who was so uncool as to inhabit - in Pam's mind - his own private condominium of coolness.
Elizabeth Strout
#89. With music, you can create instant trust with an audience. You can hear three notes, and you surrender to it, whereas it takes you about ten minutes of language before people begin to trust you in a play.
George C. Wolfe
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