Insgesamt English Quotes

The allegation that English girls had no conversation must be true; but theirs was a SPEAKING silence. Their eyes and smiles were eloquent! She hoped it would teach their own girls that they need not chatter like magpies. ~ Edith Wharton

God Child is a free and inspirational translation of Adam. Adam means 'human', not 'man'. The Hebrew for 'man' is 'aish'. In English man can mean both man and human, which may have caused the confusion in the first place. If Adam isn't the first male Homo sapiens, who or what is he? ~ Stefan Emunds

The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution. ~ Salman Rushdie

My husband and I speak an ancient language called grammatical English, and the kids speak a strange dialect which is difficult to decode because it is based on only four phrases: 'Huh,' 'I dunno,' 'It's not my turn,' and 'I do everything around here! ~ Teresa Bloomingdale

Fact been no more than a small skirmish between the MacKenzies and a detachment of English troops on their way to join the main body of the army. Said army was even now assembling ~ Diana Gabaldon

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don't like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven's sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs ~ Stephen Fry

But if I accept these conditions," said Fosti, "what shall be the compensation of the king of Norway, my ally 'i" " Seven feet of English land," answered the envoy; "or, as Hardrada is a giant, perhaps a little more. ~ Walter Scott

I was ready to approach her with my English charm, when her brass knuckled boyfriend grabbed me by the arm. ~ Elton John

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

Second, English has dispensed with the need to match nouns and verbs by gender, so you don't have to know what sex a table is before you can correctly talk about a table. ~ Robert M. Knight

Abuelita speaks no english. she doesn't need to, zoe thinks. her smile fills and communicates so much more than the empty, half-said words of zoe's life. ~ Mary E. Pearson

Personally, I think sex should be like math.
At school.
No one really cares if they're crap at math. They even proclaim it. They'll say to anyone, "Yeah, I don't mind science and English, but I'm absolutely shithouse at math." And other people will laugh and say,"Yeah, me too. I would have a clue about all that logarithm shit. You should be able to say that about sex too.
You should be proudly able to say, "Yeah I wouldn't have a clue about all that orgasm shit, ay. I'm okay at everything else but when it comes to that part I wouldn't have a clue. ~ Markus Zusak

Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said
and I will never forget it
When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest to England so that a flag for the colony could be designed. A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one. And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo. ~ Mark Kurlansky

Yeah. Calm down. Two of the most useless words in the English language. ~ Lili St. Crow

Those last three words said it all, brought the situation into sharp focus. Yawning before him was the chasm of English social class - the very system he was taught to respect. He felt the burden of his title more at that moment than at any other. And he suddenly saw the ludicrousness of the notion that one human being was better than another, of the belief that a title - an ancient trophy granted at the whim of a king - and a subsequent accident of birth made one man more deserving respect than another. There was insanity in that concept and in the fact that it was so readily accepted by an immoral world. ~ Jill Barnett

The fact that the descent of the Quran led not only to the foundation of one of the world's great civilizations, but also to the creation of one of the major scientific, philosophical, and artistic traditions in global history was not accidental. Without the advent of the Quran, there would have been no Islamic sciences as we know them, sciences that were brought later to the West and we therefore would not have words such as "algebra," "algorithm," and many other scientific terms of Arabic origin in English. Nor would there be the Summas of St. Thomas Aquinas, at least in their existing form, since these Summas contain so many ideas drawn from Islamic sources. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed. ~ Colm Toibin

Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. ~ George Orwell

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers. ~ George Orwell

A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there ~ Stephen Fry

Listen, boy, just ask the chef to make me a proper Full English Breakfast. You know, bacon, fried eggs, sausages, liver, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes, black pudding, kidneys, baked beans, fried bread, toast and served with strong English mustard, mind - none of this effete French muck - and a large mug of hot, strong Indian tea. ~ Bryan Talbot

I guess that isn't the right word, she said. She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Ultimately, to have a career in movies, to a certain extent, certainly in England, you can't sustain a career in just English movies. ~ Clive Owen

As an English actress constantly playing Americans, you already had to step way out of your box in that way. ~ Minnie Driver

When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up. ~ Colm Toibin

The English language was a delight to them, so illogical and fertile and well-suited to their natural desire to confuse, obfuscate, and generally side-step clear meaning whenever possible. ~ John Varley

Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation. ~ John McWhorter

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated? ~ Christopher Hitchens

I'll read to you," Elizabeth said. "Any preferences?" "Evelyn Waugh." "Really? How strange." "That's what Konrad said. He said Waugh is for readers who know the English and understand what's being satirised. And I told him that maybe the books are better when you don't know it's satire and just think it's comedy." Elizabeth considered this. "You're probably right. I find him much too cruel. And almost unbearably sad." Hiroko's ~ Kamila Shamsie

As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language. ~ Larry Wall

For example, I loved English and history at school. I would have loved to have done a degree in either. But my Mom said I didn't have time for university. ~ Vanessa Mae

'Hot Fuss' was all based on fantasy. The English influences, the makeup - they were what I imagined rock was. I'm a dreamer, you know? So I dug into that dream and made 'Hot Fuss.' But hearing people call us 'the best British band from America' made me wonder about my family and who I was. ~ Brandon Flowers

Fiske spoke sharply to the four walls. "We need medical attention immediately. We have a gunshot wound that requires treatment."
"You're not going to get through to them by talking like an English professor," scoffed Reagan. "Hey!" she bawled. "Get a doctor down here! She's in pain, thanks to you! What are you going to do about it? ~ Gordon Korman

I followed the words of the famous Russian proverb: Doveryai, no proveryai (or, in English, 'Trust, but verify'). ~ Randi Minetor

Because you've been on dates where y'know, you forget to open your eyes and wear pants and speak English. ~ David Cross

Gore speaks to America as if English is its second language; George W. speaks as if English is his second language. ~ Adam Clymer