Pastoral Resources

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

I took some classes in sign language when I was in my early teens because I was told that I would be completely deaf very early. But I never really wanted to learn.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.

Writers let themselves be enticed by the language.

I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.

Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.