Native Tongue Quotes

#1. 'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.'

Ursula K. Le Guin

#2. We cannot rely on our native tongue if our spouse does not understand it. If we want them to feel the love we are trying to communicate, we must express it in his or her primary love language.

Gary Chapman

#3. Only idiots and infants need things. The language of needs is the native tongue of socialists, therapists, and paternalists of all sorts and is addressed to needy dependents. The language of wants is spoken by self-respecting adults and is addressed to other self-respecting adults.

Thomas Szasz

#4. Jesper couldn't keep the disdain from his voice. "Only Nina and Matthias speak Fjerdan."
"I speak Fjerdan," Wylan protested.
"Schoolroom Fjerdan, right? I bet you speak Fjerdan about as well as I speak moose."
"Moose is probably your native tongue," mumbled Wylan.

Leigh Bardugo

#5. Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

#6. You love trickery."
"I love puzzles. Trickery is just my native tongue.

Leigh Bardugo

#7. For me, chess is a language, and if it's not my native tongue, it is one I learned via the immersion method at a young age.

Garry Kasparov

#8. By the time the last of these relationships ended I was such a quaking mass of colliding, exploding neurotransmitter malfunctions that the only coherent sentence I could form in my native tongue went: Never again.

Merrill Markoe

#9. We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.
I have no native tongue.

Chuck Palahniuk

#10. Technology is my native tongue. I'm online six hours a day.

Howard Rheingold

#11. Is. English. Not. Your. Native. Language?" Grim spoke each word separately, and strung each syllable out.
Nick hated it when he did that.
"Oh, how silly of me," Grim continued. "I forgot Stupid is your native tongue.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#12. No matter what your native tongue is, no matter what part of the world you're from, if your native tongue is distorted with an accent, somehow that's always funny.

Benjamin Bratt

#13. The two women switched to their native tongue. Kate tuned them out. She understood only half of what they were saying. As with most Americans, Dutch sounded to her more like a disease of the throat than an actual language

Karin Slaughter

#14. She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.

Jodi Picoult

#15. Trickery is not my native tongue, but I may learn to speak it yet.

Leigh Bardugo

#16. Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

Czeslaw Milosz

#17. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

Wade Davis

#18. I seem to recall Trinity kicking your ass a time or two, Acari Loren. Easy enough with such a wide target.
I hated stooping to such ridiculously adolescent taunts, but sometimes you needed to speak the native tongue.

Veronica Wolff

#19. Stop your bitching, Nick. You should try being an immortal demon who's lived since the dawn of time having to sit through this crap when English is not my native tongue, and if you think you're fluent in it, buddy, I actually know what a gerund is.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#20. Hickory clicked something to Dickory in their native tongue; Dickory clicked back. Hickory responded, and Dickory replied, it seemed a bit forcefully. And then, God help me, Hickory actually sighed.

John Scalzi

#21. I hold 'Mi Tierra,' my first Spanish-language album, very close to me because that was all done in my native tongue and won me my first Grammy.

Gloria Estefan

#22. Facts are God's native tongue.

Michael Dowd

#23. Do you speak perfectly in your native language? No, and you don't blame yourself for making mistakes in your native tongue. So why feel bad when you make mistakes while speaking a foreign language?

Rocket Learning Books

#24. That was a tall order for Ivy. Sarcasm was kind of her native tongue, though she was fluent in "stern disappointment" and "light condescension" as well. She was also a good friend. Well, imaginary friend.

Brandon Sanderson

#25. And I think for a man whose native tongue is Spanish to be able to put together a phrase like 'cultural genocide' just speaks to how bright he is.

Robert Downey Jr.

#26. Any good thing you say to me shall not be forgotten. I shall carry it as near to my heart as my children, and it shall be as often on my tongue as the name of the Great Spirit.

Ten Bears

#27. The difficulties besetting the translators of the LXX were very great. It was almost impossible to reproduce the native inimitableness of a Semitic language in an Aryan tongue. They had to adopt new constructions, some lexical and syntactical forms which were foreign to the older Greek.

John Courtenay James

#28. There is much to be learned from the world around us - far more than we normally comprehend. The Ancient Ones knew this well - most particularly the wise teachers among them - those who, in the Navajo tongue, were called "Anasazi.

Anasazi Foundation

#29. Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I'd gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were "stressed out".

David Sedaris

#30. A strong tie binds novelists to their mother tongue. Though novelists can and do write in languages other than their own, there is a common belief that a novel has a special, almost mystical affinity with the novelist's mother tongue.

Minae Mizumura

#31. The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo; And now my tongue's use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp, Or like a cunning instrument cased up Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

William Shakespeare

#32. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#33. To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.

Alexander McCall Smith