Quotes About English

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.

Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.

Charlotte poured a stiff Irish coffee for herself, wanting both stimulation and sedation. It didn't work, in fact it backfired, making her antsy but confused. An anti-Irish coffee, must be an English coffee.

The English are quite mad, from the lowest to the highest, but I think they will conquer the world for they are the only folk (excepting the brash Americans who do not count) who know that they are right in all things

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose.

This house has enough nooks and crannies for English muffins.

Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.

I would go to newsstands and buy paperbacks they were selling for tourists, usually bestsellers and mass market paperbacks. In the beginning, it was like going to the Rosetta Stone--I didn?t understand anything, I'd get a headache--but I began to figure it out, and I'd read a lot of Stephen King paperbacks. I've always said he was my English professor.

The words are the words of English, but the sense is the sense of confusion.

Mumbai is really and truly Mother to millions! Interestingly, the Mother is called MUM in English, BA in Gujarathi, and AAI in Marathi. Hence MUMBAI is definitely a special name for Mother, in my view. Long live Mumbai.

Always becoming, never arriving. Life is at a standstill - only ideas flash past. In such confusion I find myself running after them: Hey! Stop! Stop! But they escape, leaving me staring at a grey English spring.

Because I'm an English ninja," Tanith replied. "We're just like regular ninjas, except we wear leather and flirt more.

Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurately measure K-12 student knowledge in English and math, also encourages children to step up their "critical thinking."

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.

English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.

I take great solace that Einstein failed math. I failed math. I also failed English and home economics. Einstein was an underachiever.

The gist had been that institutions, even individual departments in governments, were the concrete embodiments of not just ideas or opinions but also of attitudes and emotions. Like hate or empathy, statements such as "immigrants need to learn English or they're not really citizens" or "all mental patients deserve our respect.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.

Along with tableity (the condition of being a table) and paneity (the state of being bread), cellarhood is a wonderful example of the spectacular ways English has of describing things that no ever thinks it necessary to describe.

The OED, more so than any other dictionary, encompasses the entire history of the modern English language. By so doing it also encompasses all of English's glories and foibles, the grand concepts and whimsical conceits that make our language what it is today.