English Quotes
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The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now.
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What I see as specially English is the charm - everyone is so polite. Being restrained is part of the charm. And I love the sense of humour - it takes me back to Australia. The English are great at making fun of themselves. They're so self-effacing.
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Why am I a liberal? Because I don't forget that I'm an immigrant and that I'm a Hispanic and that I have a Latin accent when I speak English, and I want to defend those who get racially profiled by people who would discriminate against us?
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I read good. I was an English major.
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We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
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The junk-bond era has also spawned something that calls itself New Historicism. This seems to be a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science. ... To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense.
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There are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy.
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The most meaningless term in the English language is 'I take full responsibility.' When a politician utters those words it means absolutely nothing.
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The more English is heard in the world, the more gratifying it seems to speak French, and above all to know the culture of our country. They find a kind of French social grace in the language and culture.
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His head was boiled, impaled upon a pole and raised above London Bridge. So ended the life of Thomas More, one of the few Londoners upon whom sainthood has been conferred and the first English layman to be beatified as a martyr.
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The English, a spirited nation, claim the empire of the sea; the French, a calmer nation, claim that of the air.
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We were doing the same thing. We will never have "a" Chicano English or Spanish because of regional differences. But I think that because of our bilingual history, we'll always be speaking a special kind of English and Spanish. What we do have to do is fight for the right to use those two languages in the way that it serves us. Nuevo-mexicanos have done it very well for hundreds of years, inventing words where they don't have them. I think the future of our language is where we claim our bilingualism for its utility.
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What I like about Hollywood is that one can get along by knowing two words of English -- SWELL and LOUSY.
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English is the easiest language to speak badly.
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I'm into books - I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.
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My mom is a Sikh immigrant born in a refugee camp. My Irish-Swedish-Norwegian-Danish-English-American dad grew up Baptist.
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My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.
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My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English.
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If anything, I've thought of myself as Scandinavian. Particularly, Danish. We spoke English at home.
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Surely there is no language more majestic than that of Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible, and if I am to have one language that I know as only a native can know it, I consider myself unbelievably fortunate that it is English.
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I speak French, German, English, and Dutch, and I can say a few words in Spanish - none of these languages have anything to do with Valyrian.
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Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.
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If it had not been for the English I should have been emperor of the East, but wherever there is water to float a ship we are sure to find them in our way.
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An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
