Suddenly I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get. I was really scared. I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk. For three days, I couldn't answer the phone.
- F Murray Abraham
Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun, and if the sun don't come, we'll be standing in the English rain.
- John Lennon
... The truth of the matter is, that most English people don't know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants.
- Douglas Adams
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
- Ronald Reagan
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
- James Joyce
Well, then, why do we need all these books?" the boy asked.
"So that we can understand those few lines," the Englishman answered, without appearing really to believe what he had said.
- Paulo Coelho
In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child.
- Jodi Picoult
The English judged a person so that they'd be justified in casting her out. The Amish judged a person so that they'd be justified in welcoming her back. Where I'm from, if someone is accused of sinning, it's not so that others can place blame. It's so that the person can make amends and move on.
- Jodi Picoult
He wished he knew what to say to make her feel better, but the truth was, he
didn't feel all that great himself and he didn't know if there were even any words in the English
language to take away this kind of stunning shock, this understanding that the world isn't the place
you thought it was.
- Jodi Picoult
That was morality ; things that made you disgusted afterwards. No, that must be immorality. That was a large statement. What a lot of bilge I could think up at night. What rot ! I could hear Brett say it. What rot ! When you were with the English you got into the habit of using English expressions in your thinking.
- Ernest Hemingway
The most beautiful words in the English language are 'not guilty'.
- Maxim Gorky
Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind--the relief and the horror.
- Nicole Krauss
The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.
- Eric Alterman
Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.
- Jonathan Ames
Cited by the author of 'Lucky Jim' as one of the most dismal depressing questions in the English language: Shall we go straight in?
- Kingsley Amis
They dragged the air mattress up to the widow's walk and eventually figured out how it was supposed to inflate, but Lucas had to read the instructions in Spanish because the English ones were nearly incomprehensible. Hilariously so.
"Insert mouth to the purpose inflation," Helen whispered.
...
"Expel lung into inflator tube," Lucas whispered back. "That sounds like it would hurt.
- Josephine Angelini
Your great country is wonderful at stealing pieces of history and using it for its own purposes, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it but the English were incredibly exercised about it.
- Michael Apted
Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.
- Joan Of Arc
The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
- Thomas B Macaulay
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
- Thomas B Macaulay
The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!
- John Astin
That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.
- W H Auden
Man does not strive for happiness,only the Englishman does.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.
- Kenneth Baker
One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable.
- Oscar Wilde
The English country gentleman galloping after the fox the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
- Oscar Wilde
The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.
- Oscar Wilde
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
- Oscar Wilde
Yes, it would nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story.
- Andrew Barger
Sometimes for me not throwing a tantrum is what running a marathon or swimming the English Channel must be like for others of a less-challenging emotional nature..
- Roseanne Barr
Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing--
turn your toes out when you walk---
And remember who you are!
- Lewis Carroll
Nevertheless.. was a word, certainly, but much more than a word, it was a concept. "Nevertheless" was what you said when you were not going to budge, whether expressing an opinion or an intention. It was a statement, not a question, and the only word in the English language to which it was pointless to respond. If you wanted to end a conversation or an argument "nevertheless" was your word.
- Brunonia Barry
I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.
- Drew Barrymore
The city and province were given up to anarchy; the coloured people, elated with victory, proclaimed the slaughter of all whites, except the English, French, and American residents.
- Henry Walter Bates
I'd been trying for a while to get parts that weren't just the English bad guy, so it was quite refreshing to be playing someone who was a compassionate, decent guy.
- Sean Bean
The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
- Thomas Beecham
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
- Robert Benchley
It is strange to an American that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are brutal with vegetables. It is just one of those national differences which are unfathomable.
- John Steinbeck
Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.
- John Steinbeck
Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you!
- Haruki Murakami
It was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air.
- E M Forster
They had nothing in common but the English language.
- E M Forster
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
- E M Forster
The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.
- Bjork
That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution.
- William Blackstone
The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.
- Edward Bond
What soilders whey-face?
The English for so please you.
Take thy face hence.
- William Shakespeare
the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national
- William Shakespeare
In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
(On the Bravery of the English Common Soldiers)
- Samuel Johnson
The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.
- Malcolm Bradbury
I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.
- Malcolm Bradbury
I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.
- Carl Sandburg
I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.
- Kenneth Branagh
I know the English are terribly sentimental about the sea, but I can live without it.
- Libba Bray
Jared had his back to the wall, which Kami thought was a reflex when he was uncomfortable. She wanted to shield him. "He was doing someZen jogging," she claimed.
Jared flicked her an incredulous glance. "Yes," he said slowly. "Zen jogging. I wasn't wearing that many clothes becausethat's part of the process. You're meant to commune with the elements. Normally, I wouldn't have worn my jeans, but I put them on because I know the English are a modest people.
- Sarah Rees Brennan
Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man's character, the other its nadir. An yet, to me the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. (MARCH - Chapter 11 - page 168)
- Geraldine Brooks
By the by, if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible.
- Van Wyck Brooks
Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro
And what should they know of England who only England know?
The English Flag, Stanza 1 (1891)
- Rudyard Kipling
Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?
- Jackson Browne
That's different. The French know that the English are superior to them and they're appropriate about it. The Eastern Europeans on the other hand have no sense of place. All that communism has them thinking that everyone really is of the same class and we are absolutely not. But they don't know that.
- Colin Browne
It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way a making all other hunman endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect
- Bill Bryson
The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
- George Bernard Shaw
I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.
- George Bernard Shaw
The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.
- George Bernard Shaw
schwa: The faint vowel sound in many unstressed syllables in the English language. It is signified by the pronunciation "uh" and represented by the symbol upside down e. For example, the e in overlook, the a in forgettable, and the o in run-of-the-mill.
It is the most common vowel sound in the English language.
- Neal Shusterman
No one sleeps in Hell except as a possible defensive posture in retaliation during yet another punitive presentation of The English Patient.
- Chuck Palahniuk
The sign was spray-painted in Arabic and English, probably from some attempt by the farmer to sell his wares in the market. The English read: Dates-best price. Cold Bebsi.
"Bebsi?" I asked.
"Pepsi," Walt said. "I read about it on the Internet. There's no 'p' in Arabic. Everyone here calls the soda Bebsi."
"So you have to have Bebsi with your bizza?"
"Brobably.
- Rick Riordan
Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home
- Mahatma Gandhi
God save the Queen and a fascist regime ... a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire
- William S Burroughs
Should, is the worst word
in the English language. People always think things "should" be a certain way, and when they're
not, they're disappointed.
- Candace Bushnell
Should," I suddenly recal myself saying to Samantha and Miranda, "is the worst word in the English language. People always thing thing 'should' be a certain way, and when they're not, they're disappointed.
- Candace Bushnell
The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.
- William Hazlitt
She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she knew: they were things that accumulated, solidly, knocked against each other, heaped and slipped.
- A S Byatt
We try to magnify the difference between Americans and the English. In real life they like the same music and dress the same. It's really much more similar than anyone thinks or how we show it.
- Amanda Bynes
The English winter - ending in July to recommence in August
- George Byron
My least favorite phrase in the English language is "I don't care."
- James Caan
The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can't play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
- Gilbert K Chesterton
"I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?
- George Carlin
Therefore, she hummed the provincial lullaby she had learned from the officers' children in the English Quarter of Jerusalem, and watched in fascination while the savage radical's eyes misted over with tears. For an instant, the prison bars melted away, and she felt God's presencefor the first time since their imprisonment. She was not a captive, and this man was not her captor. Indeed, they were both merely God's children.
- V S Carnes
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
- Raymond Chandler
Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.
- Stephen King
I admired the English immensely for all that they had endured, and they were certainly honorable, and stopped their cars for pedestrians, and called you "sir" and "madam," and so on. But after a week there, I began to feel wild. It was those ruddy English faces, so held in by duty, the sense of "what is done" and "what is not done," and always swigging tea and chirping, that made me want to scream like a hyena
- Julia Child
..The argument he was conducting with his neighbor as to whether the English magician had gone mad because he was a magician, or because he was English.
- Susanna Clarke
you must learn to live as I do - in the face of constant criticism, opposition and censure. That, sir, is the English way.
- Susanna Clarke
The English like eccentrics. They just don't like them living next door.
- Julian Clary
Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone.
- John Clayton
The English contribution to world cuisine - the chip.
- John Cleese
The Americans all love 'The Holy Grail', and the English all love 'Life Of Brian', and I'm afraid on this one, I side with the English.
- John Cleese
I am not accustomed to pay fulsome compliments to the English, by telling them that they are superior to all the world; but this I can say, that they do not deserve the name of cowards.
- Richard Cobden
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
- Francis Ford Coppola
As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.
- Lily Collins
The English intellect is sound, so far as it goes,but it has one grave defect--it is always cautious in the wrong place.
- Wilkie Collins
I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.
- Penelope Lively
I had declared in public my desire to be a writer... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.
- Pat Conroy
The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
- Pat Conroy
The way she told it, the English counties are littered with aging spinsters who accidentally displayed a spark of intelligence at a debutant dance and were banished forever from civilized society
- Michelle Cooper
Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.
- Henry David Thoreau
Mr. Sinclair once asked the class to make a list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language, and the only word that really seemed beautiful to me was tenderness.
- Robert Cormier
I don't know what 'operational control' of the border means, but I do understand the English language. And as I understand that phrase, that's not true. We do not have operational control.
- John Cornyn
Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.
- Douglas Coupland
Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church..
- Douglas Coupland
Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.
- Doug Coupland
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
- Alex Cox
Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.
- Alex Cox
I think one of the best words in the English language is compassion. I think it holds everything. It holds love, it holds care... and if everybody just did something. We all make a difference.
- Michael Crawford
Yeah. Calm down. Two of the most useless words in the English language.
- Lili St Crow
I must confess, my Spanish is not so good - except I read a little, so I started with the English but then determined that it would have to be in Spanish.
- George Crumb
The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it.
- Jonathan Culver
I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.
- Michael Cunningham
Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English!
- Virginia Woolf
Regret; The saddest word in the English language.
- Tonya Hurley
The poet and poetess have always had a rough time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people a la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a position and where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish.
- Guy Davenport
No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.
- Robertson Davies
Sorry," said Salo."I would say, 'Is there anything I can do?'- but Skip once told me that that was the most hateful and stupid expression in the English language.
- Kurt Vonnegut
England's civil war had ended in a consensus as the English discovered that they hated foreigners more than they hated their own countrymen.
- Len Deighton
The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.
- Charles Dickens
Now, I know I'm going to break your hearts, but I am forced to leave you. You must call up all your fortitude, and try to bear it... "Bob swore!" - as the Englishman said for "Good night", when he first learnt French, and thought it so like English. "Bob swore," my ducks!" (Chapter XXII)
- Charles Dickens
So the Trustees of Ohio State were right in 1956 when they canned the English instructor for assigning Catcher in the Rye to his freshman class. They knew there is no qualitative difference between the kid who thinks it's funny to fart in chapel, and Che Guevara. They knew then Holden Caulfield would found SDS.
- E L Doctorow
Words fail me sometimes. I have read most every word in the Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language, but I still have trouble making them come when I want them to. Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get a cold sick feeling deep down inside when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you can't stop it. And you know you will never be the same again.
- Jennifer Donnelly
And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here. Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He seems to have declared war on the King's English as well as on the English king.
- Arthur Conan Doyle
And here, above the valley of Yarrow, Lord Culter and his brother and twenty men from Midculter in their wedding finery with, thank God, half armour beneath, waited to intercept the English army on its plundering march, with two shepherds, twelve arquebuses, some pikes, some marline twine, a leather pail of powder, shot, matches, some makeshift colours, and eight hundred rusted helmets from the Warden's storehouse at Talla.
- Dorothy Dunnett
To pass over grief, they say, the Italian sleeps; the Frenchman sings; the German drinks; the Spaniard laments, and the Englishman goes to plays. What then does the Scot?' To Jerott's mind sprang, unbidden, a picture of the sword Archie Abernethy was trying to clean at this moment below.
'This one,' he said, 'kills.
- Dorothy Dunnett
And the English army, wheeling, started south at a gallop over the hill pass into Ettrick, followed by twenty men and eight hundred sheep in steel helmets.
- Dorothy Dunnett
To the Frenchmen risking their lives to drive the English from Scotland, such a feud seemed no doubt an ill-timed indulgence. To Buccleuch, any comment from a foreigner was a piece of damnable impertinence, no less.
- Dorothy Dunnett
There's some of them'll be nursing a guid scratch or two on their hinder-ends this night.... Man, it was a rout.'
'I imagine,' said Piero Strozzi, his dark face impassive, 'that my lord Grey's army would not relish their defeat either.'
'Oh, aye, the English,' said Buccleuch absently.
'We are, after all, at war with them and not with the Kerrs,' the Marshal said mildly.
- Dorothy Dunnett
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
- Henry James
Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?
- George Orwell
I will for ever, at all hazards, assert the dignity, independence, and integrity of the English bar; without which, impartial justice, the most valuable part of the English constitution, can have no existence.
- Thomas Erskine
There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain. Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions...The dictionary contained every word in the English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe, purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence.
- Jeffrey Eugenides
Everything has changed. When I was at school and was told I had better learn English, I said: What for? The English are a hell of a long way away!
- Juan Manuel Fangio
When in doubt about who's to blame. Blame the English.
- Craig Ferguson
The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.
- Colin Firth
McKisco's contacts with the princely classes in America had impressed upon him their uncertain and fumbling snobbery, their delight in ignorance and their deliberate rudeness, all lifted from the English with no regard paid to factors that make English philistinism and rudeness purposeful, and applied in a land where a little knowledge and civility buy more than they do anywhere else - an attitude which reached its apogee in the "Harvard manner" of about 1900.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
In a French accent developed through a lifetime of using English I said, 'Hello sir, I would like to row the English Channel in a bath please.'
What actually arrived in the ear of the French Navy man was, 'Hello sire, I would like to fight a condom across a bath if you please.
- Tim Fitzhigham
I love to laugh, it's my main thing. I love to abuse the English language.
- Dan Fogelberg
A German attack on Russia's ally France would, in reality, be defensivebut the English talked as if Germany was trying to dominate Europe.
- Ken Follett
Burnside left even sooner, hard on the heels of a violent argument with Meade, an exchange of recriminations which a staff observer said "went far toward confirming one's belief in the wealth and flexibility of the English language as a medium of personal dispute."
The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume III: Red River to Appomattox, War is Cruelty
- Shelby Foote
I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.
- John Fowles
It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.
- Stephen Fry
Before I joined the project most of the English people with whom I had made personal contacts were left wing and affected to some degree or other by the same kind of philosophy.
- Klaus Fuchs
And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.
- Cornelia Funke
The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.
- Charlotte Gainsbourg
I'm an advocate of the great Dr. Johnson, the English man of letters who said that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.
- George Galloway
Sight-seeing, aside from the fact that everything had been seen already, could not have for him--and intelligent Russian--the inexplicable importance attached to it by the English.
- Leo Tolstoy
The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.
- Stephen Gardiner
The English scene got more media attention with their emphasis on fashion, with the safety pins and all. There were some really good bands over there. The Sex Pistols were great.
- Greg Ginn
The Italians are said to be noisy and to gesticulate, but that is a libel dreamed up by the English.
- Jean Giono
Nowhere is the English genius of domesticity more notably evident than in the festival of afternoon tea. The chink of cups and the saucers tunes the mind to happy repose.
- George Gissing
We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.
- William Golding
Chapter One. The Bride." He held up the book then. "I'm reading it to you for relax." He practically shoved the book in my face. "By S. Morgenstern. Great Florinese writer. The Princess Bride. He too came to America. S. Morgenstern. Dead now in New York. The English is his own. He spoke eight tongues." Here my father put down the book and held up all his fingers. "Eight. Once in Florin City..
- William Goldman
The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.
- Edmond De Goncourt
First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.
- Stephen Greenblatt
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
- Stephen Greenblatt
In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.
- John Grogan
It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
- Thom Gunn
I am sick of speaking English like this... I am scared that I have become a person who is always very aware of talking, speaking, and I have become a person without confidence, because I can't be me. I have become so small, so tiny, while the English culture surrounding me becomes enormous. It swallows me... I am dominated by it... Why do we have to force ourselves to communicate with people? Why is the process of communication so troubled and so painful?
- Xiaolu Guo
Someone's just told me the English are still trying to take over the United States - is that true?
- Steve Guttenberg
The situation right after the fight wasn't too good; I believe I'm still the only champion in the world who never received the belt inside the ring once you've won the title. I held that against the English fans for a long time but I felt that also motivated me.
- Marvin Hagler
Sitting here now today, I can forgive a lot of the English people because it only takes a hand full of bad people to do something stupid like that and it can make the whole country look bad.
- Marvin Hagler
At first the English were very surprised by our disregarding the Hague Convention. But from 1916 onward they used at least as much poison as we did.
- Otto Hahn
The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.
- Margaret Halsey
It appears that the English think the Japanese... are fond of opium, and they want to bring it here also.
- Townsend Harris
In 1763 the English were the most powerful nation in the world.
- Albert Bushnell Hart
Everywhere among the English-speaking race criminal justice was rude, and punishments were barbarous; but the tendency was to do away with special privileges and legal exemptions.
- Albert Bushnell Hart
French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.
- Lafcadio Hearn
At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.
- Lafcadio Hearn
It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
- Lafcadio Hearn
The English race is the best at weeping and the worst at laughing.
- Thomas Hearne
The Englishman never enjoys himself except for a noble purpose.
- A P Herbert
The two most beautiful words in the English language are check enclosed.
- Dorothy Parker
For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.
- Utada Hikaru
In this world...
It's Heaven when:
The French are chefs
The British are police
The Germans are engineers
The Swiss are bankers
And the Italians are lovers
It's Hell when:
The English are chefs
The Germans are police
The French are engineers
The Swiss are lovers
And the Italians are bankers.
- Hidekaz Himaruya
I run an academy in Spain for young footballers who are released by their clubs and who, in my opinion, deserve a second chance. It is a rewarding job for me, but one that also reveals many of the faults in the English game.
- Glenn Hoddle
For a moment David was tempted to think that perhaps there were no good people at all outside concentration camps, but then he reminded himself of the sailor and Angelo and the English people who might have been ignorant but were certainly not bad.
- Anne Holm
This is what Hollywood tends to do. It tends to disregard tradition, history and anything factual, twisting it and turning it and making it all okay regardless of what the English may think of it.
- Christian Slater
No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.
- Anthony Minghella
If the word 'No' was removed from the English language, Ian Paisley would be speechless.
- John Hume
There is abundant proof that the opening of our ports always tends to raise the price of foreign corn to the price in the English market, and not to sink the price of British corn to the price in the continental market.
- Joseph Hume
The English press, are so nosy, and the English seem to love that eavesdropping.
- Michael Hutchence
I - and there are hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who felt on this subject as I do - have always liked my Celtic countrymen and disliked the English nation; it is a national trait of character, and I cannot help it.
- Douglas Hyde
The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.
- Dorothy L Sayers
And of course we are familiar with the English common law rule of thumb that said a man could in fact use a stick no bigger than his thumb to discipline his wife and family.
- Patricia Ireland
Kyle had to give her credit; it took skillplus no
heart and a serious abuse of the English language
to break up with someone in fewer than 140
characters.
- Julie James
The English play hockey in any weather. Thunder, lightening, plague of locusts...nothing can stop the hockey. Do not fight the hockey, for the hockey will win.
- Maureen Johnson
I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.
- James Weldon Johnson
Ah! The English language was a wonderful thing! You could always find the right word. He only wished he could speak the language.
- Terry Jones
Closure. That's probably the most unrealistic word in the English vocabulary. It's up there with heartbreak, pain, loss, and abandonment, all these things that you're supposed to get over and mend and heal but really, do you ever get over those moments?
- Katie Kacvinsky
I think we should model parts of the English language after the Inuits, who have 52 words for snow. Why don't we have 52 words for love? Instead, I have to rely on metaphors like, Her love was as pure as yellow snow.
- Jarod Kintz
There are exactly thirteen letters in my name, and there are also thirteen letters in the English alphabet. And not only are there thirteen letters in English, but there are also thirteen more. To even compete to have as much to say, I'd have to have a clone.
- Jarod Kintz
If only. -- You got to admit, standing alone those words are pretty awful, but married together like that, they must be two of the saddest in the English language.
- Lesley Kagen
If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.
- John Keegan
Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?
- Florence King
I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.
- Barbara Kingsolver
I get the impression the English kings were witty, for some reason. I feel like all you had was your wit.
- Colin Quinn
Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
- Walt Whitman
The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.
- Louis Kronenberger
This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash.
- Hanif Kureishi
A movie of mine is going to be released in Japan next year. I play a waitress who's a really regular girl in this movie. The English title isn't decided yet, but in Japanese it's I'll Get on the A Train Sometime.
- Chiaki Kuriyama
I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.
- William Labov
- F Murray Abraham
Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun, and if the sun don't come, we'll be standing in the English rain.
- John Lennon
... The truth of the matter is, that most English people don't know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants.
- Douglas Adams
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
- Ronald Reagan
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
- James Joyce
Well, then, why do we need all these books?" the boy asked.
"So that we can understand those few lines," the Englishman answered, without appearing really to believe what he had said.
- Paulo Coelho
In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child.
- Jodi Picoult
The English judged a person so that they'd be justified in casting her out. The Amish judged a person so that they'd be justified in welcoming her back. Where I'm from, if someone is accused of sinning, it's not so that others can place blame. It's so that the person can make amends and move on.
- Jodi Picoult
He wished he knew what to say to make her feel better, but the truth was, he
didn't feel all that great himself and he didn't know if there were even any words in the English
language to take away this kind of stunning shock, this understanding that the world isn't the place
you thought it was.
- Jodi Picoult
That was morality ; things that made you disgusted afterwards. No, that must be immorality. That was a large statement. What a lot of bilge I could think up at night. What rot ! I could hear Brett say it. What rot ! When you were with the English you got into the habit of using English expressions in your thinking.
- Ernest Hemingway
The most beautiful words in the English language are 'not guilty'.
- Maxim Gorky
Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind--the relief and the horror.
- Nicole Krauss
The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.
- Eric Alterman
Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.
- Jonathan Ames
Cited by the author of 'Lucky Jim' as one of the most dismal depressing questions in the English language: Shall we go straight in?
- Kingsley Amis
They dragged the air mattress up to the widow's walk and eventually figured out how it was supposed to inflate, but Lucas had to read the instructions in Spanish because the English ones were nearly incomprehensible. Hilariously so.
"Insert mouth to the purpose inflation," Helen whispered.
...
"Expel lung into inflator tube," Lucas whispered back. "That sounds like it would hurt.
- Josephine Angelini
Your great country is wonderful at stealing pieces of history and using it for its own purposes, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it but the English were incredibly exercised about it.
- Michael Apted
Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.
- Joan Of Arc
The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
- Thomas B Macaulay
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
- Thomas B Macaulay
The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!
- John Astin
That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.
- W H Auden
Man does not strive for happiness,only the Englishman does.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.
- Kenneth Baker
One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable.
- Oscar Wilde
The English country gentleman galloping after the fox the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
- Oscar Wilde
The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.
- Oscar Wilde
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
- Oscar Wilde
Yes, it would nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story.
- Andrew Barger
Sometimes for me not throwing a tantrum is what running a marathon or swimming the English Channel must be like for others of a less-challenging emotional nature..
- Roseanne Barr
Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing--
turn your toes out when you walk---
And remember who you are!
- Lewis Carroll
Nevertheless.. was a word, certainly, but much more than a word, it was a concept. "Nevertheless" was what you said when you were not going to budge, whether expressing an opinion or an intention. It was a statement, not a question, and the only word in the English language to which it was pointless to respond. If you wanted to end a conversation or an argument "nevertheless" was your word.
- Brunonia Barry
I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.
- Drew Barrymore
The city and province were given up to anarchy; the coloured people, elated with victory, proclaimed the slaughter of all whites, except the English, French, and American residents.
- Henry Walter Bates
I'd been trying for a while to get parts that weren't just the English bad guy, so it was quite refreshing to be playing someone who was a compassionate, decent guy.
- Sean Bean
The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
- Thomas Beecham
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
- Robert Benchley
It is strange to an American that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are brutal with vegetables. It is just one of those national differences which are unfathomable.
- John Steinbeck
Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.
- John Steinbeck
Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you!
- Haruki Murakami
It was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air.
- E M Forster
They had nothing in common but the English language.
- E M Forster
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
- E M Forster
The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.
- Bjork
That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution.
- William Blackstone
The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.
- Edward Bond
What soilders whey-face?
The English for so please you.
Take thy face hence.
- William Shakespeare
the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national
- William Shakespeare
In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
(On the Bravery of the English Common Soldiers)
- Samuel Johnson
The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.
- Malcolm Bradbury
I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.
- Malcolm Bradbury
I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.
- Carl Sandburg
I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.
- Kenneth Branagh
I know the English are terribly sentimental about the sea, but I can live without it.
- Libba Bray
Jared had his back to the wall, which Kami thought was a reflex when he was uncomfortable. She wanted to shield him. "He was doing someZen jogging," she claimed.
Jared flicked her an incredulous glance. "Yes," he said slowly. "Zen jogging. I wasn't wearing that many clothes becausethat's part of the process. You're meant to commune with the elements. Normally, I wouldn't have worn my jeans, but I put them on because I know the English are a modest people.
- Sarah Rees Brennan
Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man's character, the other its nadir. An yet, to me the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. (MARCH - Chapter 11 - page 168)
- Geraldine Brooks
By the by, if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible.
- Van Wyck Brooks
Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro
And what should they know of England who only England know?
The English Flag, Stanza 1 (1891)
- Rudyard Kipling
Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?
- Jackson Browne
That's different. The French know that the English are superior to them and they're appropriate about it. The Eastern Europeans on the other hand have no sense of place. All that communism has them thinking that everyone really is of the same class and we are absolutely not. But they don't know that.
- Colin Browne
It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way a making all other hunman endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect
- Bill Bryson
The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
- George Bernard Shaw
I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.
- George Bernard Shaw
The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.
- George Bernard Shaw
schwa: The faint vowel sound in many unstressed syllables in the English language. It is signified by the pronunciation "uh" and represented by the symbol upside down e. For example, the e in overlook, the a in forgettable, and the o in run-of-the-mill.
It is the most common vowel sound in the English language.
- Neal Shusterman
No one sleeps in Hell except as a possible defensive posture in retaliation during yet another punitive presentation of The English Patient.
- Chuck Palahniuk
The sign was spray-painted in Arabic and English, probably from some attempt by the farmer to sell his wares in the market. The English read: Dates-best price. Cold Bebsi.
"Bebsi?" I asked.
"Pepsi," Walt said. "I read about it on the Internet. There's no 'p' in Arabic. Everyone here calls the soda Bebsi."
"So you have to have Bebsi with your bizza?"
"Brobably.
- Rick Riordan
Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home
- Mahatma Gandhi
God save the Queen and a fascist regime ... a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire
- William S Burroughs
Should, is the worst word
in the English language. People always think things "should" be a certain way, and when they're
not, they're disappointed.
- Candace Bushnell
Should," I suddenly recal myself saying to Samantha and Miranda, "is the worst word in the English language. People always thing thing 'should' be a certain way, and when they're not, they're disappointed.
- Candace Bushnell
The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.
- William Hazlitt
She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she knew: they were things that accumulated, solidly, knocked against each other, heaped and slipped.
- A S Byatt
We try to magnify the difference between Americans and the English. In real life they like the same music and dress the same. It's really much more similar than anyone thinks or how we show it.
- Amanda Bynes
The English winter - ending in July to recommence in August
- George Byron
My least favorite phrase in the English language is "I don't care."
- James Caan
The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can't play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
- Gilbert K Chesterton
"I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?
- George Carlin
Therefore, she hummed the provincial lullaby she had learned from the officers' children in the English Quarter of Jerusalem, and watched in fascination while the savage radical's eyes misted over with tears. For an instant, the prison bars melted away, and she felt God's presencefor the first time since their imprisonment. She was not a captive, and this man was not her captor. Indeed, they were both merely God's children.
- V S Carnes
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
- Raymond Chandler
Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.
- Stephen King
I admired the English immensely for all that they had endured, and they were certainly honorable, and stopped their cars for pedestrians, and called you "sir" and "madam," and so on. But after a week there, I began to feel wild. It was those ruddy English faces, so held in by duty, the sense of "what is done" and "what is not done," and always swigging tea and chirping, that made me want to scream like a hyena
- Julia Child
..The argument he was conducting with his neighbor as to whether the English magician had gone mad because he was a magician, or because he was English.
- Susanna Clarke
you must learn to live as I do - in the face of constant criticism, opposition and censure. That, sir, is the English way.
- Susanna Clarke
The English like eccentrics. They just don't like them living next door.
- Julian Clary
Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone.
- John Clayton
The English contribution to world cuisine - the chip.
- John Cleese
The Americans all love 'The Holy Grail', and the English all love 'Life Of Brian', and I'm afraid on this one, I side with the English.
- John Cleese
I am not accustomed to pay fulsome compliments to the English, by telling them that they are superior to all the world; but this I can say, that they do not deserve the name of cowards.
- Richard Cobden
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
- Francis Ford Coppola
As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.
- Lily Collins
The English intellect is sound, so far as it goes,but it has one grave defect--it is always cautious in the wrong place.
- Wilkie Collins
I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.
- Penelope Lively
I had declared in public my desire to be a writer... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.
- Pat Conroy
The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.
- Pat Conroy
The way she told it, the English counties are littered with aging spinsters who accidentally displayed a spark of intelligence at a debutant dance and were banished forever from civilized society
- Michelle Cooper
Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.
- Henry David Thoreau
Mr. Sinclair once asked the class to make a list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language, and the only word that really seemed beautiful to me was tenderness.
- Robert Cormier
I don't know what 'operational control' of the border means, but I do understand the English language. And as I understand that phrase, that's not true. We do not have operational control.
- John Cornyn
Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.
- Douglas Coupland
Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church..
- Douglas Coupland
Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.
- Doug Coupland
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
- Alex Cox
Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.
- Alex Cox
I think one of the best words in the English language is compassion. I think it holds everything. It holds love, it holds care... and if everybody just did something. We all make a difference.
- Michael Crawford
Yeah. Calm down. Two of the most useless words in the English language.
- Lili St Crow
I must confess, my Spanish is not so good - except I read a little, so I started with the English but then determined that it would have to be in Spanish.
- George Crumb
The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it.
- Jonathan Culver
I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.
- Michael Cunningham
Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English!
- Virginia Woolf
Regret; The saddest word in the English language.
- Tonya Hurley
The poet and poetess have always had a rough time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people a la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a position and where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish.
- Guy Davenport
No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.
- Robertson Davies
Sorry," said Salo."I would say, 'Is there anything I can do?'- but Skip once told me that that was the most hateful and stupid expression in the English language.
- Kurt Vonnegut
England's civil war had ended in a consensus as the English discovered that they hated foreigners more than they hated their own countrymen.
- Len Deighton
The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.
- Charles Dickens
Now, I know I'm going to break your hearts, but I am forced to leave you. You must call up all your fortitude, and try to bear it... "Bob swore!" - as the Englishman said for "Good night", when he first learnt French, and thought it so like English. "Bob swore," my ducks!" (Chapter XXII)
- Charles Dickens
So the Trustees of Ohio State were right in 1956 when they canned the English instructor for assigning Catcher in the Rye to his freshman class. They knew there is no qualitative difference between the kid who thinks it's funny to fart in chapel, and Che Guevara. They knew then Holden Caulfield would found SDS.
- E L Doctorow
Words fail me sometimes. I have read most every word in the Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language, but I still have trouble making them come when I want them to. Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get a cold sick feeling deep down inside when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you can't stop it. And you know you will never be the same again.
- Jennifer Donnelly
And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here. Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He seems to have declared war on the King's English as well as on the English king.
- Arthur Conan Doyle
And here, above the valley of Yarrow, Lord Culter and his brother and twenty men from Midculter in their wedding finery with, thank God, half armour beneath, waited to intercept the English army on its plundering march, with two shepherds, twelve arquebuses, some pikes, some marline twine, a leather pail of powder, shot, matches, some makeshift colours, and eight hundred rusted helmets from the Warden's storehouse at Talla.
- Dorothy Dunnett
To pass over grief, they say, the Italian sleeps; the Frenchman sings; the German drinks; the Spaniard laments, and the Englishman goes to plays. What then does the Scot?' To Jerott's mind sprang, unbidden, a picture of the sword Archie Abernethy was trying to clean at this moment below.
'This one,' he said, 'kills.
- Dorothy Dunnett
And the English army, wheeling, started south at a gallop over the hill pass into Ettrick, followed by twenty men and eight hundred sheep in steel helmets.
- Dorothy Dunnett
To the Frenchmen risking their lives to drive the English from Scotland, such a feud seemed no doubt an ill-timed indulgence. To Buccleuch, any comment from a foreigner was a piece of damnable impertinence, no less.
- Dorothy Dunnett
There's some of them'll be nursing a guid scratch or two on their hinder-ends this night.... Man, it was a rout.'
'I imagine,' said Piero Strozzi, his dark face impassive, 'that my lord Grey's army would not relish their defeat either.'
'Oh, aye, the English,' said Buccleuch absently.
'We are, after all, at war with them and not with the Kerrs,' the Marshal said mildly.
- Dorothy Dunnett
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
- Henry James
Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?
- George Orwell
I will for ever, at all hazards, assert the dignity, independence, and integrity of the English bar; without which, impartial justice, the most valuable part of the English constitution, can have no existence.
- Thomas Erskine
There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain. Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions...The dictionary contained every word in the English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe, purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence.
- Jeffrey Eugenides
Everything has changed. When I was at school and was told I had better learn English, I said: What for? The English are a hell of a long way away!
- Juan Manuel Fangio
When in doubt about who's to blame. Blame the English.
- Craig Ferguson
The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.
- Colin Firth
McKisco's contacts with the princely classes in America had impressed upon him their uncertain and fumbling snobbery, their delight in ignorance and their deliberate rudeness, all lifted from the English with no regard paid to factors that make English philistinism and rudeness purposeful, and applied in a land where a little knowledge and civility buy more than they do anywhere else - an attitude which reached its apogee in the "Harvard manner" of about 1900.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
In a French accent developed through a lifetime of using English I said, 'Hello sir, I would like to row the English Channel in a bath please.'
What actually arrived in the ear of the French Navy man was, 'Hello sire, I would like to fight a condom across a bath if you please.
- Tim Fitzhigham
I love to laugh, it's my main thing. I love to abuse the English language.
- Dan Fogelberg
A German attack on Russia's ally France would, in reality, be defensivebut the English talked as if Germany was trying to dominate Europe.
- Ken Follett
Burnside left even sooner, hard on the heels of a violent argument with Meade, an exchange of recriminations which a staff observer said "went far toward confirming one's belief in the wealth and flexibility of the English language as a medium of personal dispute."
The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume III: Red River to Appomattox, War is Cruelty
- Shelby Foote
I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.
- John Fowles
It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.
- Stephen Fry
Before I joined the project most of the English people with whom I had made personal contacts were left wing and affected to some degree or other by the same kind of philosophy.
- Klaus Fuchs
And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.
- Cornelia Funke
The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.
- Charlotte Gainsbourg
I'm an advocate of the great Dr. Johnson, the English man of letters who said that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.
- George Galloway
Sight-seeing, aside from the fact that everything had been seen already, could not have for him--and intelligent Russian--the inexplicable importance attached to it by the English.
- Leo Tolstoy
The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.
- Stephen Gardiner
The English scene got more media attention with their emphasis on fashion, with the safety pins and all. There were some really good bands over there. The Sex Pistols were great.
- Greg Ginn
The Italians are said to be noisy and to gesticulate, but that is a libel dreamed up by the English.
- Jean Giono
Nowhere is the English genius of domesticity more notably evident than in the festival of afternoon tea. The chink of cups and the saucers tunes the mind to happy repose.
- George Gissing
We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.
- William Golding
Chapter One. The Bride." He held up the book then. "I'm reading it to you for relax." He practically shoved the book in my face. "By S. Morgenstern. Great Florinese writer. The Princess Bride. He too came to America. S. Morgenstern. Dead now in New York. The English is his own. He spoke eight tongues." Here my father put down the book and held up all his fingers. "Eight. Once in Florin City..
- William Goldman
The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.
- Edmond De Goncourt
First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.
- Stephen Greenblatt
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
- Stephen Greenblatt
In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.
- John Grogan
It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
- Thom Gunn
I am sick of speaking English like this... I am scared that I have become a person who is always very aware of talking, speaking, and I have become a person without confidence, because I can't be me. I have become so small, so tiny, while the English culture surrounding me becomes enormous. It swallows me... I am dominated by it... Why do we have to force ourselves to communicate with people? Why is the process of communication so troubled and so painful?
- Xiaolu Guo
Someone's just told me the English are still trying to take over the United States - is that true?
- Steve Guttenberg
The situation right after the fight wasn't too good; I believe I'm still the only champion in the world who never received the belt inside the ring once you've won the title. I held that against the English fans for a long time but I felt that also motivated me.
- Marvin Hagler
Sitting here now today, I can forgive a lot of the English people because it only takes a hand full of bad people to do something stupid like that and it can make the whole country look bad.
- Marvin Hagler
At first the English were very surprised by our disregarding the Hague Convention. But from 1916 onward they used at least as much poison as we did.
- Otto Hahn
The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.
- Margaret Halsey
It appears that the English think the Japanese... are fond of opium, and they want to bring it here also.
- Townsend Harris
In 1763 the English were the most powerful nation in the world.
- Albert Bushnell Hart
Everywhere among the English-speaking race criminal justice was rude, and punishments were barbarous; but the tendency was to do away with special privileges and legal exemptions.
- Albert Bushnell Hart
French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.
- Lafcadio Hearn
At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.
- Lafcadio Hearn
It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
- Lafcadio Hearn
The English race is the best at weeping and the worst at laughing.
- Thomas Hearne
The Englishman never enjoys himself except for a noble purpose.
- A P Herbert
The two most beautiful words in the English language are check enclosed.
- Dorothy Parker
For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.
- Utada Hikaru
In this world...
It's Heaven when:
The French are chefs
The British are police
The Germans are engineers
The Swiss are bankers
And the Italians are lovers
It's Hell when:
The English are chefs
The Germans are police
The French are engineers
The Swiss are lovers
And the Italians are bankers.
- Hidekaz Himaruya
I run an academy in Spain for young footballers who are released by their clubs and who, in my opinion, deserve a second chance. It is a rewarding job for me, but one that also reveals many of the faults in the English game.
- Glenn Hoddle
For a moment David was tempted to think that perhaps there were no good people at all outside concentration camps, but then he reminded himself of the sailor and Angelo and the English people who might have been ignorant but were certainly not bad.
- Anne Holm
This is what Hollywood tends to do. It tends to disregard tradition, history and anything factual, twisting it and turning it and making it all okay regardless of what the English may think of it.
- Christian Slater
No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.
- Anthony Minghella
If the word 'No' was removed from the English language, Ian Paisley would be speechless.
- John Hume
There is abundant proof that the opening of our ports always tends to raise the price of foreign corn to the price in the English market, and not to sink the price of British corn to the price in the continental market.
- Joseph Hume
The English press, are so nosy, and the English seem to love that eavesdropping.
- Michael Hutchence
I - and there are hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who felt on this subject as I do - have always liked my Celtic countrymen and disliked the English nation; it is a national trait of character, and I cannot help it.
- Douglas Hyde
The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.
- Dorothy L Sayers
And of course we are familiar with the English common law rule of thumb that said a man could in fact use a stick no bigger than his thumb to discipline his wife and family.
- Patricia Ireland
Kyle had to give her credit; it took skillplus no
heart and a serious abuse of the English language
to break up with someone in fewer than 140
characters.
- Julie James
The English play hockey in any weather. Thunder, lightening, plague of locusts...nothing can stop the hockey. Do not fight the hockey, for the hockey will win.
- Maureen Johnson
I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.
- James Weldon Johnson
Ah! The English language was a wonderful thing! You could always find the right word. He only wished he could speak the language.
- Terry Jones
Closure. That's probably the most unrealistic word in the English vocabulary. It's up there with heartbreak, pain, loss, and abandonment, all these things that you're supposed to get over and mend and heal but really, do you ever get over those moments?
- Katie Kacvinsky
I think we should model parts of the English language after the Inuits, who have 52 words for snow. Why don't we have 52 words for love? Instead, I have to rely on metaphors like, Her love was as pure as yellow snow.
- Jarod Kintz
There are exactly thirteen letters in my name, and there are also thirteen letters in the English alphabet. And not only are there thirteen letters in English, but there are also thirteen more. To even compete to have as much to say, I'd have to have a clone.
- Jarod Kintz
If only. -- You got to admit, standing alone those words are pretty awful, but married together like that, they must be two of the saddest in the English language.
- Lesley Kagen
If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.
- John Keegan
Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?
- Florence King
I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.
- Barbara Kingsolver
I get the impression the English kings were witty, for some reason. I feel like all you had was your wit.
- Colin Quinn
Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
- Walt Whitman
The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.
- Louis Kronenberger
This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash.
- Hanif Kureishi
A movie of mine is going to be released in Japan next year. I play a waitress who's a really regular girl in this movie. The English title isn't decided yet, but in Japanese it's I'll Get on the A Train Sometime.
- Chiaki Kuriyama
I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.
- William Labov
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