Tropieza In English Quotes

#1. More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.) - Author: Bill Bryson

#2. I propose that English poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissecting boards. I am serious in declaring that a Sarah Lawrence English major who began poking about in a dogfish with a bobby pin would learn more in thirty minutes than a biology major in a whole semester; and that the latter upon reading on her dissecting board That time of year Thou may'st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold - Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang. might catch fire at the beauty of it. - Author: Walker Percy

#3. One person can make a difference. A huge difference. Consider what a solitary individual may accomplish: In 1645 one vote gave Oliver Cromwell control of England. In 1649 one vote cost Charles I of England his life, causing him to be executed. In 1776 one vote gave America the English language instead of the German language. In 1839 one vote elected Mark Morgan governor of Massachusetts. In 1845 one vote brought Texas into the Union. In 1868 one vote saved President Johnson from impeachment. In 1875 one vote changed France from a monarchy to a republic. In 1876 one vote gave Rutherford B. Hayes the United States presidency. In 1923 one vote gave Adolf Hitler control of the Nazi party. In 1941 one vote saved the Selective Service Agency just - Author: David Jeremiah

#4. She hit us," the woman shrieked. That was the gist of it anyway. There were a lot of unladylike words that began with "F," with various "C" words thrown in for leavening.
...
"Ben's better," I murmured. "He's more creative when he swears."
"He does it in that English accent, which is too cool. - Author: Patricia Briggs

#5. Unless people can express themselves well in ordinary English, they don't know what they are talking about. - Author: Russell L. Ackoff

#6. There was news to hear and to ask about - of English patrols in the district, of politics, of arrests and trials in London and Edinburgh. That he could wait for. Better to talk to Ian about the estate, to Jenny about the children. If it seemed safe, the children would be brought down to say hello to their uncle, to give him sleepy hugs and damp kisses before stumbling back to their beds. - Author: Diana Gabaldon

#7. As if somehow irony," she recaps for Maxine, "as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious - weakening its grip on 'reality.' So all kinds of make-believe - forget the delusional state the country's in already - must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now."

"Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school." Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko's Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, "Don't tell Ms. Cheung!"

"You notice," Heidi continues, "how 'reality' programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it's so producers shouldn't have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There's more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they're all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#8. The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time -- to start thinking in terms of projects. - Author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#9. I come from the state of Michigan. We were the first English-speaking government in the world to outlaw the death penalty, back in the 1840s. We have never had, as a state, the death penalty in Michigan. I was raised with that, and even Republicans in Michigan, nobody would even think of putting a measure on the ballot to have the death penalty. - Author: Michael Moore

#10. I often say never write about white people. Not many people realize what I mean by this. Its pretty simple. Some may think its unrealistic to have an ethnically diverse cast but its ten times more unrealistic to see a cast of only white people. Like I don't know where you've grown up but the world isn't that way, at least not if your reading this post in English. - Author: Adam Snowflake

#11. Even if I think in English, it's more a language of acting than French. - Author: Sophie Marceau

#12. Oh my research. Well, I got an English Degree. And I got that degree in a certain time/at a certain place. If you add UC Berkeley + 1984 the other side of the = is "new historian" meaning that I studied with and was influenced by those who were interested in how the personal shaped the political (and literary), how science and literature might interact, and what the body got to do with it. - Author: Laura Mullen

#13. I still love poetic imagery. I love the idea of using surrealist speak to generate lyrical content and I love the way English can be exciting in and of itself. - Author: Jeff Tweedy

#14. Theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in - Author: Charles Dickens

#15. The human mind has evolved a defense against contamination by biological agents: the emotion of disgust.111 Ordinarily triggered by bodily secretions, animal parts, parasitic insects and worms, and vectors of disease, disgust impels people to eject the polluting substance and anything that looks like it or has been in contact with it. Disgust is easily moralized, defining a continuum in which one pole is identified with spirituality, purity, chastity, and cleansing and the other with animality, defilement, carnality, and contamination. 112 And so we see disgusting agents as not just physically repellent but also morally contemptible. Many metaphors in the English language for a treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle - a rat, a louse, a worm, a cockroach. The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide was ethnic cleansing. - Author: Steven Pinker

#16. If you see the Sopranos, you're not going to be speaking in the Shakespearean English. - Author: Lucy Liu

#17. I did want to become a novelist, but the program at Waseda was pretty intense in terms of language requirements - two hours of English and four hours of Chinese. I thought, what do I need this for? So I stopped going to class. - Author: Hirokazu Koreeda

#18. Overstatement, too, plays a considerable part in English social life. This takes mostly the form of someone remarking: 'I say…' and then keeping silent for three days on end. - Author: George Mikes

#19. It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive. - Author: Edmund Wilson

#20. Should such an ignorant people lead the world? How did it come to this in the first place? 82 percent of us don't even have a passport! Just a handful can speak a language other than English. - Author: Michael Moore

#21. If somebody's going to earn citizenship, with whatever other hurdles are put in the way, at the end of the road they should be able to speak English, they should be able to read English, they should have some knowledge of American history, - Author: Rudy Giuliani

#22. I took a seat. The garden was bursting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it was that I had never sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something that I'd want to do. And all around me there were people who did this regularly. It occurred to me that I really was in someone else's country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. - Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates

#23. It is a very great mistake to suppose, as a few English cooks still do, that spaghetti and macaroni should be soaked in water before cooking. - Author: Elizabeth David

#24. Knowing English is important, but for us Venezuelans I think it would also be important to know Portuguese . For that reason, we should evaluate the possibility of it being taught in our schools. - Author: Hugo Chavez

#25. When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt the English language, and I fell in love with it. - Author: Michel Faber

#26. Because the Indians are planning to start war now, the common people want all of them destroyed so that they can live in peace; however, this is probably a sinful and not at all decent wish. Not to mention the fact that the Indians were the first and legitimate inhabitants and hence are the rightful owners of this land. . . . If the English traders treated the Indians better, the Indians would behave better. - Author: Johann Martin Boltzius

#27. The younger, certainly, had to the full that charm
of a constitutional freshness of aspect which may
defy for a long time extravagant or erring habits of
life; a physiognomy healthy-looking, cleanly, and
firm, which seemed unassociable with any form of
self-tormenting, and made one think of the nozzle of
some young hound or roe, such as human beings
invariably like to stroke - with all the goodliness, that
is, of the finer sort of animalism, though still wholly
animal. It was the charm of the blond head, the
unshrinking gaze, the warm tints: - neither more
nor less than one may see every English summer, in
youth, manly enough, and with the stuff in it which
makes brave soldiers, in spite of the natural kinship
it seems to have with playthings and gay flowers. - Author: Walter Pater

#28. Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth. - Author: Calvin Trillin

#29. [Someone had left the lid off the big tin of fairies and, if they were to be used up before they went off then lovely, moist, stale-fairy cakes were the only option. Nota bene, years later all of the magic would be taken out of these little confections and they would become known in "global" "English" rather more drearily as "cupcakes". This is why you can no longer buy tins of either fresh or dried fairies except in speciality comestible shops.] - Author: Ian Hutson

#30. In the past when I was in Hollywood, I was like a dog. I felt humiliated. My English was not good. People would even ask me 'Jackie Who?'. - Author: Jackie Chan

#31. Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses - certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body, - Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates

#32. 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. - Author: Kurt Vonnegut

#33. He liked the English and their peculiarities. He liked their stoicism under pressure; on the wall in his factory he kept a copy of a war poster emblazoned with the Crown of King George and underneath the words Keep Calm and Carry On. - Author: Natasha Solomons

#34. But for the first time, I don't feel like the English language has developed enough letters in the alphabet to adequately express the words I want to say to you. - Author: Colleen Hoover

#35. Absolutely, there is a connection between food and love. I always say, when there's love in my heart or I'm feeling particularly good, the food comes out that much better. And so I think Valentine's Day is a special day. - Author: Todd English

#36. Shakespeare shows you what it is possible to do in English as a writer - but also shows you that you might as well give up. As it's all been done before and hundreds of years ago. So I have had that long-standing relationship of oppression and inspiration. - Author: Chris Adrian

#37. The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands. - Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin

#38. If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible. - Author: Robert Breault

#39. The United States is a conceited nation with shallow roots, and what happened before living memory doesn't seem to interest most people I know at home. We like living in our houses with our new furniture, on our new streets in new neighborhoods. Everything is disposable and everything is replaceable. Personal family history can feel simply irrelevant in our new world, beyond the simplest national identifications, and even those who can get sort of vague for people. I remember a boy in high school who told the history teacher he was 'half Italian, half Polish, half English, half German, and one-quarter Swedish.' I think one of the reasons so many of us are disconnected from our histories is because none of it happened where we live in the present; the past, for so many, is a faraway place across an ocean. - Author: Katharine Weber

#40. [A translation into English of a poem Elisabeth wrote two weeks after her wedding]

Oh, had I but never left the path
That would have led me to freedom.
Oh, that on the broad avenues
Of vanity I had never strayed!

I have awakened in a dungeon,
With chains on my hands.
And my longing ever stronger-
And freedom! You, turned from me!

I have awakened from a rapture,
Which held my spirit captive,
And vainly do I curse this exchange,
In which I gambled away you -freedom!- away.

The Reluctant Empress, Chapter 2 - Author: Brigitte Hamann

#41. I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless. - Author: Colin Wilson

#42. It is difficult to understand why statisticians commonly limit their inquiries to Averages, and do not revel in more comprehensive views. Their souls seem as dull to the charm of variety as that of the native of one of our flat English counties, whose retrospect of Switzerland was that, if its mountains could be thrown into its lakes, two nuisances would be got rid of at once. - Author: Francis Galton

#43. More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor. - Author: John W. Vessey, Jr.

#44. The idea of mixing pigments and gum arabic together to make watercolor paint is very old. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century the English chemists W. Winsor and H. Newton were the first to add glycerin to the blend to make the paints maintain a semi-moist consistency when stored in paintboxes. - Author: Felix Scheinberger

#45. All three of the English types I have mentioned can, I think, be accounted for as the results of the presence of different cultures, existing side by side in the country, and who were the creation of the folk in ages distantly removed one from another. In a word, they represent specific " strata" of folk-imagination. The most diminutive of all are very probably to be associated with a New Stone Age conception of spirits which haunted burial-mounds and rude stone monuments. We find such tiny spirits haunting the great stone circles of Brittany. The "Small People," or diminutive fairies of Cornwall, says Hunt, are believed to be "the spirits of people who inhabited Cornwall many thousands of years ago. "The spriggans, of the same area, are a minute and hirsute family of fairies" found only about the cairns, cromlechs, barrows, or detached stones, with which it is unlucky to meddle." Of these, the tiny fairies of Shakespeare, Drayton, and the Elizabethans appear to me to be the later representatives. The latter are certainly not the creation of seventeenth-century poets, as has been stated, but of the aboriginal folk of Britain. - Author: Lewis Spence

#46. They're allies, Jamie."
She immediately let go of him, straightened her back, and refolded her hands in her lap. "I guessed as much," she whispered.
It was a lie, made blacker still when she added, "Even from this distance I can see them smiling."
"An eagle couldn't see their faces from this distance," he answered dryly.
"We English have perfect eyesight. - Author: Julie Garwood

#47. In 869 we have an event which rapidly achieved almost mythic status in English Christian folklore: the horrible martyrdom of King Edmund of East Anglia by the appalling Ivar the Boneless, who according to some traditions brought a great Viking army to England in pursuit of revenge for the killing of his father, the semi-legendary Ragnar Lothbrok, executed by the king of Northumbria. - Author: Heather O'Donoghue

#48. We live in America,' he said. 'Everyone who speaks English understands you. How they interpret you is something else. - Author: Carrie Fisher

#49. In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell. - Author: Donald E. Westlake