Quotes About English

We have The Idylls of the King in English class this term. I like some things in them, but I detest Tennyson's Arthur. If I had been Guinevere I'd have boxed his ears - but I wouldn't have been unfaithful to him for Lancelot, who was just as odious in a different way. As for Geraint, if I had been Enid I'd have bitten him. These 'patient Griseldas' deserve all they get.

I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne—I'd give them a chance.

But the English are different, and they don't know how to be other than different.

I've just served five years in a great war —the only struggle that still interests me is the conflict with the sentence, sir—the English sentence.

My English is much better than my sister Elisa's," he adds affably. "Your English ees better," Elisa snaps, "because you love to talk to foreign girls. All foreign girls," she adds, sweeping her cold, dark, mascaraed gaze around at us to emphasize her message: that her brother is a big slut and we shouldn't be flattered by his attentions.

and opened his mouth to speak in that precise drawl which is the trademark of the overly educated upper class english gentleman. A high voice: A biting one: definitely an eccentric.

And he'll beat you, beat you, beat you And he'll beat you all to pap And he'll eat you, eat you, eat you Every morsel snap snap snap! English Lullaby

I love Evensong. There's something sad and essentially English about it.

There being in the make of an English mind a certain gloom and eagerness, which carries to the sad extreme; religion to fanaticism; free-thinking to atheism; liberty to rebellion.

Sad to hear Paul Scholes is retiring, great player, world class player, the English Zizou.

It is my experience that the short path to the simple and precise English needed by a man of science lies thorough the tongues of Homer and Vergil.

Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.

Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek.

An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or discover a corpse and not raise a "hue and cry." But

Even the English Roman Catholics, at their college in Rheims and then Douai, had applied a small team of men to the job.

It is to do with John Overall's lust. The poor man, who was forty-four in 1604, found it easier, he told his friends, to preach in Latin, which he had studied so hard and so long, and that he found it 'troublesome to speak English as a continued oration'. Despite (or perhaps because of?) that rather unworldly removal from everyday discourse, the dean fell in love with and married the sexiest girl in London. Anne Orwell was irresistible:

They seem a selfish, churlish, unsocial race, totally absorbed in making money; a mongrel breed, half-English, half-Dutch, with the worst qualities of both countries

Kate and Kendrick were those rare English bureaucrats who lived in the future not the past, something that no one in Ireland ever did.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. Derek Walcott

the bizarre reign of Oliver Cromwell, far more of a tyrant than King Charles ever was. The few non-Puritan members of Parliament were evicted, and the remaining few dozen supported Cromwell, who insisted that he held his "calling" from God. England was divided into military districts, and Puritan standards were enforced: Christmas was abolished, theaters closed, and other elements of English life frowned on by the "Saints" were eliminated.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

Italians basic word chest, as tallied in a recent dictionary, totals a measly 200,000, compared to English's 600,000 (not counting technical terms). But

the same metaphors and themes sound again and again in mystic discourse, like a muffled peal of bells in English change-ringing.

I do not blench at nature red in tooth and claw... And much as I love The Wind in the Willows and the works of Beatrix Potter, I never dress my animals in clothes... They behave as animals should behave, with the exception that they open their mouths and speak the Queen's English.