Devices Quote by Ambrose Bierce

“Dictionary, n. A malevolent literacy device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.”

— Ambrose Bierce

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can…

— Ambrose Bierce

“When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton ”

— W.H. Auden

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

— Terry Eagleton

It is by metaphor that language grows.

— Julian Jaynes

Words become sentences, twisted, difficult/The story weaves itself, always noisiest at night/As herds of words won't stop. .

— Ritu Ghatourey

Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed…

— Joseph Brodsky

Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his…

— William Benton Clulow

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must…

— Judith Butler

“Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language”

— Anthony Burgess

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

— Roy Blount, Jr

“[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like…

— J.M.G. Le Clézio