Non Literary Language Quotes & Sayings

I often reread passages of "Lolita" for its exquisite language. To me, "Lolita" has no message, no purpose, other than to exist as a marvel of literary creation. It has wit, intelligence and style. It pointedly makes no attempt to serve a higher moral purpose, and previous attempts by critics to find one have proven ludicrous. The annotated edition is accompanied by a brilliant afterword by Nabokov that is a lucid reminder of the pure joy of writing, its interplay with life. — Amy Tan

I was always creatively stubborn, adverse to editing by others, and wanted to use the kind of Ukrainian we spoke among ourselves rather than the more artificial prescribed literary Ukrainian. The problem was the greatest in prose, where editors would change my language because "it sounded better this way." My poetry they left alone probably out of deference to that hallowed genre. — Yuriy Tarnawsky

The charm of your writing," Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, "depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language. — Nancy Mitford

My goal was to reach this literary crowd, but I didn't want to alienate my core fan base. I grew up speaking that language, this isn't put on. I can go back and forth; it's almost like being bilingual. But I'm not college educated; I don't know rules of grammar. — Rude Jude

They shared much with Bloomsbury, including love of beauty, companionship, and conversation, but they differed from their older London counterpart in their religious ardor, their social conservatism, and their embrace of fantasy, myth, and (mostly) conventional literary techniques instead of those dazzling experiments with time, character, narrative, and language that mark the modernist aesthetic. — Philip Zaleski

as the descendants of the Normans finally amalgamated with the English natives, the Anglo-Saxon language reasserted itself; but in its poverty it had to borrow hundreds of French words (literary, intellectual, and cultural) before it could become the language of literature. — Richard A. LaFleur

I may fight the British ruler, but I do not hate the English or their language. In fact, I appreciate their literary treasures. — Mahatma Gandhi

As we have seen, French culture and language interacted with native English culture for several generations after the Norman Conquest. A common word such as 'castle' is a French loan word, for example; and the whole romance tradition comes from the French. But this sensibility, culture, and language becomes integrated with native culture.
As well as the beginnings of what came to be called a courtly love tradition, we can find in Early Middle English (around the time that Layamon was writing Brut) the growth of a local tradition of songs and ballads. — Ronald Carter

One can't have literary comprehension without real experience, mere grammatical knowledge of the words is useless without recognition of their values, and when you young people want to understand a country and its language you should start by seeing it at its most beautiful, in the strength of its youth, at its most passionate. You should begin by hearing the language in the mouths of the poets who create and perfect it, you must have felt poetry warm and alive in your hearts before we smart anatomizing it. — Stefan Zweig

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties. — Harold Bloom

Because it exists as a living sonority, music is animated by voices, and these voices do not evaporate when music confronts the insights of contemporary literary criticism, or philosophy of language. — Carolyn Abbate

Samskrit language, as has been universally recognized by those competent to form a judgment, is one of the most magnificent, the most perfect, the most prominent and wonderfully sufficient literary instrument developed by the human mind. — Sri Aurobindo

How can one talk in a classical language about a child who's torn apart in an explosion in the market near his school? People in Iraq don't talk about their joys, their problems, and the destruction of the country in literary diction. — Hassan Blasim

I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me. — Adrian Mitchell

All writing is rubbish.
People who try to free themselves from what is vague in order to state precisely whatever is going on in their minds are producing rubbish.
The whole literary tribe is a pack of rubbish mongers, especially today.
All those who have landmarks in their minds, I mean in a certain part of their heads, in well-defined sites in their skulls, all those who are masters of language, all those for whom words have meaning, all those for whom the soul has its heights and thought its currents, those who are the spirits of the times, and who have given names to these currents of thought - I am thinking of their specific tasks, and of that mechanical creaking their minds produce at every gust of wind - are rubbish mongers. — Antonin Artaud

The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for 'serious literary' fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important. — Joyce Carol Oates

So-called "natural language" is wonderful for the purposes it was created for, such as to be rude in, to tell jokes in, to cheat or to make love in (and Theorists of Literary Criticism can even be content-free in it), but it is hopelessly inadequate when we have to deal unambiguously with situations of great intricacy, situations which unavoidably arise in such activities as legislation, arbitration, mathematics or programming. — Edsger Dijkstra

This backwards journey in the narrating of this 'membering, this remembrance, is a lesson I learned from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and which considers how language, in this case, English, the only language I know, is at present of profound interest, when used in a non-traditional manner. I have used this language in The Polished Hoe, and I call it many things, but the most precise definition I have given it is contained in a booklet published by the Giller Prize Foundation, celebrating the tenth anniversary of this literary prize. In that review of the literary problems I faced in the writing of The Polished Hoe in 2002, my main concern was to find a language, or to more strictly use the language I already knew, in such a way that it became, in my manipulation of it, a "new" language. And to explain the result of this experiment, I said that I intended to "creolize Oxford English. — Austin Clarke

A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms. — Roman Jakobson

I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose. — Sol Stein

But Longinus and his intellectual descendants had been concerned with the Sublime as a literary effect: how language, not landscape, could be lofty, grand or inspiring. — Robert Macfarlane

It is not that complexity is overrated, but is is overcomplicated; it is not that obscurity is too obscure, it's that the underside grows grungy if it isn't exposed to the change of air;
it is not that the language is exhausted, it is that we run down; it's not that the edge won't cut anymore, it is that the cuts are getting thinner;
it's not that art is artificial, it is that the artists get outright seditty; it's not that literary reputations are not inevitable, it's that they are invented;
not that theories are not beautiful, but that they are feeble — C.D. Wright

In my experience when critics raise these objections, they invariably violate one of seventeen principles for interpreting the Scriptures ... For example, assuming the unexplained is unexplainable ... failing to understand the context of the passage ... assuming a partial report is a false report ... neglecting to interpret difficult passages in light of clear ones; basing a teaching on an obscure passage; forgetting that the Bible uses nontechnical, everyday language; failing to remember the Bible uses different literary devices ... — Norman Geisler

To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else: to the 'words on the page' rather than to the contexts which produced and surround them. It implies a limiting as well as a focusing of concern - a limiting badly needed by literary talk which would ramble comfortably from the texture of Tennyson's language to the length of his beard. But in dispelling such anecdotal irrelevancies, 'close reading' also held at bay a good deal else: it encouraged the illusion that any piece of language, 'literary' or not, can be adequately studied or even understood in isolation. It was the beginnings of a 'reification' of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself, which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism. — Terry Eagleton

In fiction, I have a residual guilt when I focus on story over language or mood or whatever - the more "literary" things. In screenwriting, I don't have that guilt because story is the only thing. Character, dialogue, everything else - they feed into and drive story. — Nick Antosca

The problem may be a literary one: we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower - and wither - all around us.
Even those who live out the best version of the familiar story line might not find happiness as their reward. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I know a woman who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life that she has lived according to her principles. But I wouldn't call her happy; her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better language to describe. There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person - honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope. — Rebecca Solnit

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation ... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. — Robert Morgan

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former. — Northrop Frye

Christian monks and nuns were, in effect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only people who could read and write before the fourteenth century. It is interesting therefore that most of the native English culture they preserved is not in Latin, the language of the church, but in Old English, the language of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. — Ronald Carter

Gunn would be an important figure-rewarding, delightful, accomplished, enduring-in the history of English-language poetry even were his life not as fascinating as it now seems; he would be an important figure in the history of gay writing and in the history of transatlantic literary relations even were his poetry not so good as it is. With his life as it was and his works as they are, he's an obvious candidate for a volume of retrospective and critical essays, and this one is first-rate. — Stephen Burt

And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to "cellar door": "Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me - 'cellar door,' say. From that, I might think of a name, 'Selador,' and from that a character, a situation begins to grow. — Philip Zaleski

All the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arabic as children. It sounds like a foreign language. The words for "house" or "table" or "lamp" are not the same as the words we use at home, and most of the other words are alien to children at school. Classical Arabic is one of the prisons of the Arab world. — Hassan Blasim