Language Structure Quotes

#1. I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

Barbara Kingsolver

#2. When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.

Leni Zumas

#3. The first thing we should do in order to grasp the realm of time travel is by redefining
general perception and common concepts regarding time within our daily language structure.

Toba Beta

#4. Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language.

Kenneth L. Pike

#5. We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?

Kenneth L. Pike

#6. You have already achieved the English-Language poet's most important goal: you can read, Write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence.

Stephen Fry

#7. The best stories are universal stories that have been told for as long as humanity has existed it's just figuring out new ways to do it, with language, with structure. And so I'm always trying to do that.

James Frey

#8. A novel, even a social realist one, can't simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself.

Chang-rae Lee

#9. A data structure is just a stupid programming language.

Bill Gosper

#10. Of all the languages that have existed upon the Earth, the Hebrew language is unique and extraordinary in its ability to paint vivid pictures with words that lodge within the heart conveying deep and profound Truth".

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#11. Word books traditionally focus on unusual and quirky items. They tend to ignore the words that provide the skeleton of the language, without which it would fall apart, such as 'and' and 'what,' or words that provide structure to our conversation, such as 'hello.'

David Crystal

#12. The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

Werner Heisenberg

#13. And now it turns out that women can't even talk like men. Which is a clever way to invalidate women's discourse, isn't it? No wonder women can't do magic; no wonder spirits won't listen to their puny, trivial, voices. It's all woven into the basic structure of the language.

Emily Croy Barker

#14. I think in some ways, acting and writing are the same. You're getting inside the skin of someone else; you're creating their language and their actions. As a writer, you have to see the whole picture and the structure, and you have to understand every character.

Finn Wittrock

#15. So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language.

Michael Polanyi

#16. In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Alexander Pope

#17. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

Italo Calvino

#18. Programming language is very specific to instructing a computer to do a particular structure of a sequence. It's the very way you tell the machine what you want it to do.

Brian Kernighan

#19. What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?

Lynne Truss

#20. The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

Jeffrey Kluger

#21. In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

Don DeLillo

#22. The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

Noam Chomsky

#23. Ultimate meaning is meaningless. Meaning meaning means everything else.

Brian Spellman

#24. Their mutual gravitational attraction will ultimately cause them to collapse inward, in manifest disagreement with an apparently static universe.

Lawrence M. Krauss

#25. All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Roland Barthes

#26. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.

David Plotz

#27. There is a risk of becoming linguistically schizophrenic. Because your brain is so fluent in both languages, it is fooled into thinking that the structure you have put together in the target language is correct merely because it is correct in the source language.

Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown

#28. The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself.

Noam Chomsky

#29. The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language

Don DeLillo

#30. I know what the structure of the language is.

Kurt Loder

#31. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

Don DeLillo

#32. I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#33. I think that every film should have its own structure, and that's the beauty of film language - is that we get to express that deeply individualistic side of ourselves.

Brian Lindstrom

#34. No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.

Edward Sapir

#35. TV is a language all its own, a land of one dimensional stereotypes that destroys culture, not adds to it. TV is anti-art, a reflection of consumerism that serves the power structure. TV is about demographics.

Roseanne Barr

#36. The structure of this material does not follow standard European language teaching style. The Cherokee language is too different from any European language to be able to follow such a style. Cherokee is a language of description and of relationship.

Michael Joyner

#37. Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#38. The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either.

William Jones

#39. Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Alfred Korzybski

#40. The one overall structure in my plays is language.

Edward Bond

#41. The language of images [of inner-oriented artists] does not follow a code structure that is evident and widely accepted, but is more likely to be a complex of symbols that have a profound meaning for the artists themselves.

Kenneth Coutts-Smith

#42. Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

Jane Rule

#43. I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.

Keith Haring

#44. The Structure of Magic I by Richard Bandler and John Grinder is a delightful simplification of the infinite complexities of the language I use with patients. In reading this book, I learned a great deal about the things that I've done without knowing about them.

Milton H. Erickson

#45. I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.

Daniel Day-Lewis

#46. Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.

Michael Crichton