Famous quotes containing the words indefinite and/or language:
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeares description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“This is of the loonI do not mean its laugh, but its looning,is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)