Quotes About English

A lot of English traditional music is guesswork anyway, so it's very difficult for people to be vehemently opposed to experimenting with it.

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.

But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.

The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.

I've always had a fondness for language... English. Not that I use it correctly but I like words. I like books and I like poetry.. I like the written word... and the sung word.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.

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?

The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination - not the small reach of their courage or latent power.

It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game.

Punch' being of course an Indian word, arriving in the English language via the Hindustani panch (five), a reference to the number of ingredients for the drink, which traditionally were (according to Hobson Jobson) 'arrack, sugar, lime-juice, spice and water'.

On his deathbed, Haidar had written to Tipu with advice to his son on the art of good government. He warned him that the Company would attempt to exploit any weakness in the succession: 'The greatest obstacle you have to conquer is the jealousy of the Europeans,' he wrote. 'The English are today all-powerful in India. It is necessary to weaken them by war.

but instead they 'experienced from his unruly troops, and from his disorderly generals, every act of oppression and extortion imaginable; and, on the other hand, they saw every day what a strict discipline the English officers of those days did observe, and how amongst them that travelled, [the officers] carried so strict a hand upon their troops, as to suffer not a blade of grass to be touched; then

Whatever their many vices, wrote Shushtari, the English welcomed and rewarded talent: 'the English have no arbitrary dismissal,' he noted, 'and every competent person keeps his job until he writes his own request for retirement or resignation. More remarkable still is

In the course of this, in what seemed to many of its wisest minds an act of wilful self-harm, the English had unilaterally cut themselves off from the most powerful institution in Europe, so

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.

All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied comparison.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.