Quotes About Oral Language

#1. What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.

Yann Martel

#2. I think there is always that kind of thing when you're opening that you just want to blow the headline band away.

Simon Taylor-Davis

#3. The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts.

Douglas Coupland

#4. My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.

James Thurber

#5. The actor already comes with emotions to the scene: fear, the fear of being in front of the camera. It is this fear that spurs the emotion of the scene. I too am afraid; I don't know exactly what I am searching for. On the set, we are all participating in this fear together.

Bruno Dumont

#6. Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

Steven Pinker

#7. When we were on acid, we would go into the woods, because there was less chance that you would run into an authority figure. But we ran into a bear. My friend Duane was there, raising his right hand, swearing to help prevent forest fires. He told me, "Mitchell, Smokey is way more intense in person!"

Mitch Hedberg

#8. Warning: This book contains graphic language, sex, lies, intrigue, clowns, kleptomania, anal sex, oral sex, mutual masturbation, bad driving, good cooking, and the missing head of a Justin Timberlake statue. Not for the sour of disposition.

L.B. Gregg

#9. Hillary had never run for office before, but she decided to give it a try. She began her campaign the way she always does new things, by listening and and learning. And after a tough battle, New York elected her to the seat once held by another outsider, Robert Kennedy.

William J. Clinton

#10. I think what makes a good actor's director is the same thing that makes a good director. Acting is just one of the trades necessary to make a movie.

Matt Damon

#11. It is what is painted between the outlines that makes the difference between merely competent painting and really meaningful art.

Philip Pearlstein

#12. Marriage ... is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)

Joseph Campbell

#13. Without acquainting me with the language or the literature or the oral family histories which my ancestors had loved, they volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#14. Resistance by definition is self-sabotage.

Steven Pressfield

#15. I turned toward his army. It was now roughly one hundred and ninety-nine to one. I did the natural thing. I charged them.

Rick Riordan

#16. I try not to speak about all the charities and people I help, because I believe we can only be truly generous when we expect nothing in return.

Muhammad Ali

#17. There is no normal life, there's just life.

Doc Holliday

#18. Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.

Harold Innis

#19. Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.

Alice McDermott

#20. The conscience of this nation is the Constitution.

William O. Douglas

#21. Faith has to be exercised in the midst of ordinary, down-to-earth living.

Elisabeth Elliot

#22. Certainty' with respect to successful language learning and use--whether oral, written, or technologically mediated combinations--applies less and less to discrete products and more to adaptive processes.

Jay Jordan

#23. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

Sara Sheridan

#24. 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

#25. To whirle the eyes too much shewes a Kites braine.

George Herbert