Quotes & Sayings About Italian Language

Though her grasp of English was modest and his Italian non-existent, their rapport was at once intuitive and intimate, founded more on physical attraction and a shared love of the outdoors than meaningful conversation. — Robert Radcliffe

Referring to my desire to appropriate Italian, he [Domenico Starnone] wrote, 'A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.' How much those words reassured me ... They contained all my yearning, all my disorientation. Reading this message, I understood better the impulse to express myself in a new language. To subject myself, as a writer, to a metamorphosis. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian. — Michelle Hunziker

I always say to young people, "Get the hell out of the United States." Especially if you're young, like if you're 21 or something. Let's say you don't speak any Italian. You're 21. Everyone's going to want to sleep with you and be nice to you. And the best way to learn a language is to sleep with someone from that country. — David Sedaris

The English language is direct, unapologetic, and wonderfully amoral. Italian has a beautiful sound, but you cannot help but feel that you are always dealing with ghosts from the past and the looming dark presence of the Vatican. — Chiara Barzini

I had been learning Italian for years. I always loved Latin, but Italian is a living language; I'm writing in it now as well as reading it. It is so interesting delving further into language. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it. — Maurice Druon

He spoke Spanish, English, Italian, and just enough of every other language to be able to charm women around the world. — Lynsey Addario

Creoles tend to express variations in time by having a string of helping verbs rather than by having complicated word formation rules. In other words, they are more like English in this respect than like a language such as Italian:
English: I thought she might have been sleeping.
Italian: Pensavo che dormisse.
The idea of potential (in the English "might"), completed or whole action (in the English "have"), and stretched-out activity (in the English "been") that go with "sleeping" are all expressed in the ending on the Italian verb dormisse. (Dorm is the root for "sleep"; isse is the ending that carries all the meaning about the time frame.) — Donna Jo Napoli

I had no idea what they were saying in Italian as a child, they spoke too quickly on the radio. But I realized that language was very funny. — Dominic Chianese

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. — Edith Wharton

English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary. — Bernardo Bertolucci

I love the Italian culture - it's a beautiful culture. I love the language, the Italian people, their music, their attitudes ... I just love it! Sometimes I think I'm an Italian trapped in a Spanish woman's body. — Penelope Cruz

As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36) — Jon Stewart

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

You can learn Elvish, if you want. It's a language like Italian and English. You can learn to read it, you can learn to write it, and you can learn to speak it. — Christopher Lee

And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes. — Kate Atkinson

You know, it's a funny thing. The only Romance language Felipe doesn't happen to speak is Italian. But I go ahead and say it to him anyway, just as we're about to jump.
I say: 'Attraversiamo.'
Let's cross over. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The Indians are the Italians of Asia", Didier pronounced with a sage and mischievous grin. "It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe, but you do understand me, I think. There is so much Italian in the Indians, and so much Indians in the Italians. They are both people of the Madonna - they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The Language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalite. They are nations where love - amore, pyaar - makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours. — Gregory David Roberts

I want to eat good Italian food and get better at their language. It seems so romantic too. — Kristin Chenoweth

You don't have to have a language in common with someone for a sexual rapport. But it helps if the language you don't understand is Italian. — Madonna Ciccone

Why are you studying Italian? So that - just in case Italy ever invades Ethiopia again, and is actually successful this time - you can brag about knowing a language that's spoken in two whole countries?
But I loved it. Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. I would slosh home through the rain after class, draw a hot bath, and lie there in the bubbles reading the Italian dictionary aloud to myself, taking my mind off my divorce pressures and my heartache. The words made me laugh in delight. I started referring to my cell phone as il mio telefonino ("my teensy little telephone") I became one of those annoying people who always say Ciao! Only I was extra annoying, since I would always explain where the word ciao comes from. — Elizabeth Gilbert

In Italy, the Index's ban was enforced. Bibles were publicly and ceremonially burned, like heretics; even literary versions of scriptural stories in drama or poetry were frowned on. As a result, between 1567 and 1773, not a single edition of an Italian-language Bible was printed anywhere in the Italian peninsula. — Diarmaid MacCulloch

I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it. — Jhumpa Lahiri

In later centuries, both Spanish and Italian patriots have claimed him; but in fact the background of this obscure map maker and sea captain is extremely vague. He himself was always quite evasive about his origins, although he claimed to come from Genoa. In Spain he referred to himself as a foreigner (extranjero), but he kept his journals and made marginal notations in his books in Spanish, not Italian; his letters to his brother Bartholome and his son Diego were also written in Spanish, and he wrote Latin in a recognizably Spanish manner. Yet his Spanish was the language of the fourteenth century, and his characteristics seemed to suggest a Catalan background. Furthermore, although he made an elaborate show of his Christian piety, he always kept company with Jews and Muslims. — Jane S. Gerber

Italian as a language, she thinks, suits children with its singsong cadences and rising lingering inflections, its quick swinging gait and easy adaptability to argument, to passionate outbursts. — Glenn Haybittle

The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language. — Kim Hunter

What fascinated me about English was what I later recognized as its hybrid etymoogy: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects is invigorating, richly entertaining, and often funny, as it is to Shaskespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry.. — Camille Paglia

But very affectionately. Since you're up on the language, why don't we finish the night off by ... "
She rose up to whisper in his ear, ending the provocative Italian with a quick nip on his lobe.
"Ummm." He didn't have a clue what she'd said, but the blood had cheerfully drained out of his
head. "I think I'm going to need a translation on that one. — Nora Roberts

[On Italian:] One may almost call it a language that talks of itself, and always seems more witty than its speakers. — Madame De Stael

When I took part in European leaders summits, it was sometimes unpleasant for me to hear Romanian, Polish, Portuguese, and Italian friends speak English, although I admit that on an informal basis, first contacts can be made in this language. Nevertheless, I will defend everywhere the use of the French language. — Francois Hollande

Dolce far niente: the pleasure of doing anything — Elizabeth Gilbert

Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it's tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian — Jhumpa Lahiri

I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is. — Roy Blount Jr.

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian. — Donna Tartt

Italian was my first foreign language. I speak it better than English. — Iman

I suppose you heard him yelling as the doctor set his leg."
"I never knew there were so many rude words in the English language. Or French, German, Italian, Latin,or ... there was another language I didn't quite recognize."
"Greek. — Karen Hawkins

Italians had a "national peculiarity" to use distinctive hand gestures and body language when they spoke: a resource that was, he believed, obvious to an Italian like Leonardo when he came to paint The Last Supper. — Ross King

During the first months in Rome, my clandestine Italian diary is the only thing that consoles me, that gives me stability. Often, awake and restless in the middle of the night, I go to the desk to compose some paragraphs in Italian. It's an absolutely secret project. No one suspects, no one knows. I don't recognize the person who is writing in this diary, in this new, approximate language. But I know that it's the most genuine, most vulnerable part of me. — Jhumpa Lahiri

All gentlemen of any rank with whom he holds conversations can speak Latin, French, Spanish or Italian. They are aware that the English language is only used in this island and would consider themselves uncivilized if they knew no other tongue than their own. — Ian Mortimer

An Italian woman came out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron.
'Mr Greenleaf?' Tom asked hopefully.
The woman gave him a long, smiling answer in Italian and pointed downward toward the sea. 'Jew,' she seemed to keep saying. 'Jew. — Patricia Highsmith

You should read Spanish,' he said. 'It is a noble tongue. It has not the mellifluousness of Italian
Italian is the language of tenors and organ-grinders
but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in a flood. — W. Somerset Maugham

The melodious language wrapped itself around her heart and touched her soul in a way that felt like...home. [Italian works its magic] — Sharon Timm

I speak a little bit of Italian, yeah. I understand more than I speak. I speak more of a dialect; my mum's from Naples and my dad's from Sicily, so it comes out little a bit of a cocktail of the Italian language. — Luke Pasqualino

I want to learn how to speak Italian. For years, I'd wished I could speak Italian
a language I find more beautiful than roses — Elizabeth Gilbert

When you're in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don't want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest. — Diriye Osman

The Swedish language combines the strong manhood of the German with the delicate beauty of the Italian. — Bayard Taylor

My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast. — Clive James

During the 1920s, progressives developed a fascination with and admiration for Italian and German fascism, and the fascists, for their part, praised American progressives. These were likeminded people who spoke the same language, and progressives and fascists worked together to implement programs to sterilize so-called mental defectives and "unfit" people, resulting subsequently in tens of thousands of forced sterilizations in America and hundreds of thousands in Nazi Germany. — Dinesh D'Souza

I tried to learn the languages - Italian, Spanish, and German - not to successfully. Working on a European set isn't a hell of a lot different from working on an American set. — Lee Van Cleef