Besetzt English Quotes

I'm working on a film called 'Bonnie.' Bonnie means water. It's in English, and it's dealing with a future world in a megacity - which is what the U.N. says we're going to be - but in this megacity, a city that runs out of water. ~ Shekhar Kapur

You know what I think about when I'm alone and you are far away?" he murmured. "I think about you, naked, under the sun."
He licked her nipple. She whimpered.
"Not the English sun, mind you, because it is never adequate. But the sun over the Arabian sea. Or the sun of the south of France. Light brilliant enough to shatter mirrors. And you, naked, in that light, your thighs open this wide - ~ Sherry Thomas

We must insist on assimilation - immigration without assimilation is an invasion. We need to tell folks who want to come here, they need to come here legally. They need to learn English, adopt our values, roll up their sleeves and get to work. ~ Bobby Jindal

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. ~ George Orwell

When I was old enough, I was 21 years of age, I decided to come to America. I did it illegally, so I jumped the border. I didn't speak any English. ~ Cesar Millan

I disliked singing in English and neither liked the story nor the character of Cressida. ~ Walter Legge

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots - written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements - and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or - it sounded just as bad in English - 'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party of God' and have done with it? At least they didn't have the nerve to say that they stole other people's land because their own home in Poland or Belarus had been taken from them. They said they took the land because god had given it to them from time immemorial. In the noisome town of Hebron, where all of life is focused on a supposedly sacred boneyard in a dank local cave, one of the world's less pretty sights is that of supposed yeshivah students toting submachine guns and humbling the Arab inhabitants. When I asked one of these charmers where he got his legal authority to be a squatter, he flung his hand, index finger outstretched, toward the sky. ~ Christopher Hitchens

boor (which originally just meant "farmer," as in the German Bauer and Dutch boer); villain (from the French vilein, a serf or villager); churlish (from English churl, a commoner); vulgar (common, as in the term vulgate); and ignoble, not an aristocrat. ~ Steven Pinker

As a player it is great to experience many other ways of playing, other tactics and other mentalities. I have played in several countries and because of that I know without any doubt that the English league is the one for me. ~ Djibril Cisse

English, unlike Arabic, was not a poetic language. English had been cobbled together by too many unknown parents, too many unsure users. English lacked the single word that differentiated an attacking lion from one at rest. Nor did English have the capacity to relay the succinct, linguistic separation of a maternal uncle from a paternal one. English was not a thoughtful language. ~ Aminah Mae Safi

French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisan intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe. ~ Camille Paglia

I'm just God m'love, I'm just the English major. I don't know anything. ~ Lloyd Dallas

He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the "submental grunt" as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career, - ~ Vladimir Nabokov

She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded
like nothing he had seen or known in England. Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. English was too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech for Sasha. For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed. ~ Virginia Woolf

I'm crazy about Shakespeare, who was a notorious word inventor. And my wife is an English teacher, and she's hilarious. ~ Rob Delaney

Do you speak English?" "Certainly. And I understand American. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

At some point my friends and I began to ask, how can a country that produced hippies and such cool people also fight a war and kill people and act cruelly? You would see American GMC trucks go by and soldiers reaching down to whack a girl riding a bicycle. They would yank at her hat and she would get thrown and she would die. You would see Americans do this and feel like they can do anything in our country. But then you'd take an English class with an American soldier from Ohio who seemed just as nice as anyone, yet he was a soldier too. ~ Nguyen Qui Duc

What's this bit in Chinese that keeps popping up?" he said. "Xuĕ Lóng?"
"It's the codename for the operation."
"What does it mean?"
"Xuĕ Lóng is a mythical Chinese creature said to bring darkness, cold, and death."
"What's the translation?"
"In English, it would be called a snow dragon. ~ Brad Thor

I've always used Old English in certain songs. ~ Erik Rutan

We always say we are beneath the stars. We aren't, of course - there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human - we are whos, other animals are that - but English puts us beneath the stars, at least. ~ John Green

If you sit on an airplane and you tell the English person sitting next to you that you have a bomb in your bag, they would probably be pissed off. Not as much pissed off as if you were talking to them all the time during the journey, but still, quite pissed off. ~ Angela Kiss

So the English approach to show business and their work is more - and this is a big generalization, I hasten to say - but it's more, they work on it as a craft job. ~ Elizabeth McGovern

It's important that top clubs don't lose sight of the fact that it's the English Premier League and English players should be involved. ~ Alan Pardew

I was crossing the English Channel with a carbon-fiber wing on my back. ~ Felix Baumgartner

I live in a small country in Europe - Finland - and I don't speak English well and I had nothing to do with publishing houses in the West. I lived in complete isolation. ~ Hassan Blasim

Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet. ~ Niall Ferguson

He has a fascination with mortals.
Raphael had said that to her before she'd woken with wings of midnight and dawn.
"Why are you starting at me, Ellie?" Illium said without taking his eyes from the blade dancing around his fingers.
The words were instinctive, something she might as easily have said to rib Ransom. "You're so pretty, it's difficult to resist."
A flashing grin, a hint of that aristocratic English accent in his response. "It's hard to be me, it's true.
~ Nalini Singh

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world - indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states - the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

You can learn Elvish, if you want. It's a language like Italian and English. You can learn to read it, you can learn to write it, and you can learn to speak it. ~ Christopher Lee

When an English man speaks well, for example now, and this is another way of putting us down, they say he's "eloquent" you see. "Oh, eloquent chap they are!" An Irish person speak well, they say, "Ah, you have the gift of the gab." "Ah, you kissed the blarney stone." You see, all of this putting us down. ~ Malachy McCourt

Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I'm from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters. ~ William, Saroyan

I don't feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don't feel either. And, in another way, of course, I'm both. ~ Martin McDonagh

Books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic. ~ Amos Oz