Dialect Quotes - Page 3

• French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts.

  Patricia Hampl

  Missing, Essentials, Common

  4 Copy quote

• I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

  Ron Rash

  Writing, Different, Diaries

  "This Week in Fiction: Ron Rash" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. May 9, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I was doing theater for all those years in New York, I did a lot of classical theater, wearing big corsets and big dresses and doing dialects. It's interesting that once I moved to TV, I'm playing these scrappy, contemporary toughies.

  Mireille Enos

  New York, Years, Interesting

  "Q&A – Mireille Enos (Sarah Linden)". AMC Interview, www.amc.com. April 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.

  Virginia Heffernan

  Depression, Thinking, People

  7 Copy quote

• When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Here And There, Attention

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.301, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal 'language' but many languages and dialects. There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages.

  Judith Lynne Hanna

  Dance, Language, Conventional Wisdom

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry must find ways of breaking distance.... all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds.

  Giannina Braschi

  Distance, Poetry, Way

  Giannina Braschi (1998). “Yo-yo boing!”, Latin Amer Literary Review Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• But this is a story, and in a story there is always someone beautiful enough." - 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Beautiful, Girl, Two

  6 Copy quote

• You speak baby gibberish?' asked Jack. 'Fluently. The adult-education center ran a course, and I have a lot of time on my hands.' 'So what did he say?' 'I don't know.' 'I thought you said you spoke gibberish?' 'I do. But your baby doesn't. I think he's speaking either pre-toddler nonsense, a form of infact burble or an obscure dialect of gobbledygook. In any event, I can't understand a word he's saying.' 'Oh.

  Jasper Fforde

  Baby, Thinking, Hands

  7 Copy quote

• But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before; though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left God not for gods, they say, but for no gods; and this has never happened before. That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, and the money, and power, and what they call life, or race, or dialect.The church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms upturned in an age which advances progressively backwards?

  T. S. Eliot

  Religious, Men, Race

  T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.144, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am very good with dialects, but the two that I can't do for some reason are the South African and Australian.

  Liev Schreiber

  Two, Reason, Very Good

  4 Copy quote

• When you get to speak Irish, you become more at one with yourself, you kind of have a spark when you use it, and I think it's a great dialect.

  Glenn Quinn

  Thinking, Use, Sparks

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mexican food is far more varied than people think. It changes like dialects. I was brought up in Jalisco by the sea on a basic diet - tomatoes, chillis, peppers of every size and rice, which is a Mexican staple. The Pacific coast has a huge array of seafood.

  Gael Garcia Bernal

  Thinking, Sea, People

  "What's in your basket, Gael García Bernal?" by Morwenna Ferrier and Dr John Briffa, www.theguardian.com. June 19, 2010.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Communication, Care, Language

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1907). “Ponkapog papers: A sea turn, and other papers”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My first day on the set of 'John Adams', I was just supposed to fly to Virginia for a costume fitting. But the director figured, why not shoot it, too? So they threw me into a dress that didn't fit, gave me lines I hadn't seen, in a dialect I didn't know, and two screaming, arching infants.

  Mamie Gummer

  Virginia, Two, Directors

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese.

  David Tang

  Chinese, Nine, Tone

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Dad, Italian, Littles

  "Discovery: Luke Pasqualino" by Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. August 12, 2012.

  54 Copy quote

  Show source

• Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.

  Steven Pinker

  Character, Biblical, Editing

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.28, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I must confess the language of symbols is to me
  A Babylonish dialect
  Which learned chemists much affect;
  It is a party-coloured dress
  Of patch'd and piebald languages:
  'T is English cut on Greek and Latin,
  Like fustian heretofore on satin.

  Sir Richard Phillips

  Latin, Party, Learning

  52 Copy quote

• In college, I went to school for acting; we had to learn phonetics just to be able to do dialects and all that stuff. I'm somebody who does better just hearing it. I'll just imitate it, and I get it better that way. When I know too much information, I'm not great.

  Eliza Coupe

  School, College, Acting

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• 'Particularly' is particularly difficult because the 'L' and the 'R' are totally different, like totally different letters. I would spend hours in front of the mirror with my dialect coach to observe my tongue. You don't think, when you speak, about all the things that happen in your jaw and your mouth, how everything reacts, so you have to watch all those things and realise we have a totally different use of our tongue and jaws.

  Marion Cotillard

  Thinking, Mirrors, Dialect Coach

  "Public Enemies - Marion Cotillard interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

  John H. McWhorter

  Black, Great Men, Variety

  7 Copy quote

• Everywhere the sky is blue. There are a multitude of cuisines and dishes. I think of them as the languages and dialects of food.

  Ferran Adria

  Thinking, Blue, Sky

  19 Copy quote

• It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

  David Sedaris

  Mistake, Shoes, Population

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I speak in Christian terms or Buddhist terms I'm simply selecting for the moment a dialect. Christian words for me represent the comforting vocabulary of the place I came from hometown voices saying more than the language itself can convey about how welcome and safe I am what the expectations are and where to find food. Buddhist words come from another dialect from the people over the mountain. I've become pretty fluent in Buddhist it helps me to see my home country differently but it will never be speech I can feel completely at home in.

  Mary Rose O'Reilley

  Christian, Country, Buddhist

  15 Copy quote