Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.

Thomas C. Foster
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes. - Courtney Love

  2. Language is the key to the heart of people. - Ahmed Deedat

  3. You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect. - John Green

  4. I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the... - Stephen Fry

  5. All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess. - Marcel Duchamp

More Quotes By Thomas C. Foster
  1. Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.

  2. His argument runs like this: there is no goodness without free will. Without the ability to freely choose-or reject-the good, an individual possesses no control over his own soul, and without that control, there is not possibility of attaining grace. In the language of Christianity,...

  3. Real people are made out of a whole lot of things–flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

  4. We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves...

  5. The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

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