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Foreign Language Quotes

So I stood around that big square of books. Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans.
Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.
- Aravind Adiga

The young all have the same dream: to save the world. Some quickly forget this dream, convinced that there are more important things to do, like having a family, earning money, traveling, and learning a foreign language. Others, though, decide that it really is possible to make a difference in society and to shape the world we will hand on to future generations.
- Paulo Coelho

Am I the star in this story or you?"
Blake wrinkled his nose and chuckled.
"Was that a bad analogy? I meant we're the star, Livia. Us. This." He shrugged his shoulders like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Us being in the same atmosphere is either a great cosmic catastrophe or the most serendipitous rendezvous." Blake pronounced the French word like a closeted foreign language teacher.
- Debra Anastasia

He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

His scowl returned. "Why, if they're supposed to be Greek, are all of them speaking with an English accent?"
She laughed. "Didn't you know that British is, like, the universal 'foreign' language in Hollywood? They use it in any movie where they want to have a foreign feel to it, regardless of where it's set
- Sherrilyn Kenyon

Her father was frightened by a strange bed or a foreign language or a political party he didn't belong to. Her father truly believed that the Democratic party was a subversive organization whose design would destroy the United States and put it in the hands of bearded communists.
- John Steinbeck

The first few weeks football players look at you like you are speaking a foreign language. My job is to get them to trust me, trust the system. I ask them to run in a way that makes no sense to them.
- Ato Boldon

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.
- Emma Bonino

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Moderation is like a foreign language. You have to learn that shit when you're young.
- Joey Comeau

And for some reason she held the sentence suspended without meaning in her mind's ear, "...quite enough for everybody at present," she repeated. After all the foreign languages she had been hearing, it sounded to her pure English. What a lovely language, she thought, saying over to herself again the common place words...
- Virginia Woolf

I have since tried out this human-beings-as-nothing-but-radio-receivers theory on Paul Slazinger, and he toyed with it some. "So Green River Cemetery is full of busted radios," he mused, "and the transmitters they were tuned to still go on and on."
"That's the theory," I said.
He said that all he'd been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he'd never heard before.
- Kurt Vonnegut

I don't know," I said, exasperated. "What else do you have in your wacked-out world? Heat sensors? Mine fields? Dirigibles? Booby traps? Machine guns? Shrink rays? What?"
"Aside from dirigibles, which are rather expensive and rare outside of trade routes, most of what you just said made no sense whatsoever," he said, as delighted as a child hearing a foreign language for the first time. "But it all sounds very dangerous. And fun. Especially the part about the boobies.
- Delilah S Dawson

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.
- Jacques Derrida

Screw technicolor, red, and foreign languages. I dream in status updates.
- Fierce Dolan

I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one's own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron.
- Ursula K Le Guin

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
- Barbara Ehrenreich

The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies
- George Orwell

I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.
- Joseph Epstein

If your kids attend school and grades are up that will make $1,000 contributions to some 10,000 kids across the country, are challenging kids to learn foreign languages or challenging kids to get summer jobs or seek summer enrichment opportunities?
- Harold Ford

Singing beautiful melodies is one thing, but to deliver the text so that the people understand it, even in a foreign language, has to be worked at very hard.
- Maureen Forrester

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.
- Marilyn Hacker

The conversation of the gods! - I didn't resent or feel aggrieved because I couldn't understand it. I was the smallest of the planets, and if I carried messages between them and I couldn't always understand, that was in order too: they were something in a foreign language - star-talk.
- L P Hartley

They are damn good projects - excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there - God damn it!
- Harry Hopkins

To most people, if you're muttering, you might as well be speaking a foreign language. I should know, because in college I took two years of muttering.
- Jarod Kintz

After learning the foreign language Gibberish, I became a dream spokesman.
- Jarod Kintz

My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.
- Lawrence R Klein

Playing golf is like learning a foreign language.
- Henry Longhurst

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
- Ross Macdonald

I wanted to learn a few foreign languages, and therefore I had to go abroad.
- Ella Maillart

Parents should conduct their arguments in quiet, respectful tones, but in a foreign language. You'd be surprised what an inducement that is to the education of children.
- Judith Martin

Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter's mind. It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night. She shuddered at what she saw.
- W Somerset Maugham

Basketball, in America, is like a culture. It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here.
- Yao Ming

It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you've got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots. In our lifetime, we will see Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch. -- Co.Create Online, 2-14-12
- Alan Moore

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
- Christopher Morley

After an extensive interview he arranged for my weaknesses in foreign languages to be over-looked and so I started a Biology degree at Birmingham in 1967.
- Paul Nurse

All this yummy muscleness first thing in the morning is almost too much for me to take," she cooed, and gave him a playful wink as she scooted herself into the front seat. I shook my head. If "Flirt" qualified as a foreign language, my sister and Ambrose would both have PhDs in it.
- Amy Plum

i beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. do not search fo rthe answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. and the point is, to live everything. live the questions now. perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers... At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day... Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust..
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.
- Cathy Mcmorris Rodgers

As the president of Kosovo, I am more concerned about the current situation with the employment standing at around 70 % of the population, which is young, with great potential, speaking many foreign languages and having wide expertise.
- Ibrahim Rugova

I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.
- Jeanette Winterson

It's important to me to work in my own language now and then. I love English, but you can never learn to master a foreign language if you're not brought up with it.
- Max Von Sydow

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.
- John Millington Synge

My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.
- Arabella Weir

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