English Quotes
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I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.
Aleksandar Hemon
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When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I'd get comments like, 'You should consider writing more universal stories.' But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl - just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.
Jenny Zhang
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One day, I was just thinking about something, and then - you know when you think, and you have that inner voice in your head? I realized it was in English.
Rich Brian
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Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone.
John Clayton
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Would it be possible to stand still on one spot more majestically - while simulating a triumphant march forward - than it is done by the two English Houses of Parliament?
Alexander Herzen
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Like all her friends, I miss her greatly...But...I am sure there is no case for lamentation...Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, she pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness. Those are facts.
E. M. Forster
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Trees are great. Don't get me started about how clever they are, how oxygen-generous, how time-formed in inner cyclic circles, how they provide homes for myriad creatures, how - back when this country was covered in forests - the word for sky was an Old English word that meant 'tops of trees.'
Ali Smith
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I wanted to act when I was young. When I was 12, I asked the head of English at my school, 'Can I audition?' and he said, 'What would we want you for?' And I remember going, 'Oh yeah. Why would they want me?'
Alison Moyet
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To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
W. H. Auden
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Americans who have travelled and who have English friends know we are not necessarily all baddies, but I think that seeing us being so incessantly nasty on screen has a drip, drip, drip effect on the rest of them.
David Warner
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English is my language because of the history, and what I try to do - and I did that in 'Carpentaria' in particular - is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.
Alexis Wright
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Shakespeare is a permanent presence in the English letters.
Antonio Munoz Molina
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The sense in which an automatic door 'understands instructions' from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English.
John Searle
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If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
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I wasn't very good at school and appalling at English.
Jonathan Anderson
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Me neither,” Shane put in. “Homie don’t play that.” “I wonder, sometimes, if your generation speaks English at all,” Amelie said.
Rachel Caine
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I'm inspired by films from the early '50s, especially Jean Simmons in 'The Clouded Yellow' - and by vintage swing, psychobilly gigs, sea shanties, and English folklore.
Maxine Peake
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The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.
Alfred North Whitehead
