Quotes About English

Oh, I know you like being a rogue," she assured me. "What the English call a chancer. You're unfaithful to the entire world, so why are you faithful to your wife?

I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one.

It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.

English life, while very pleasant, is rather bland. I expected kindness and gentility and I found it, but there is such a thing as too much couth.

The most characteristic English statement about belief is 'Well, I'm not particularly religious', faintly embarrassed by the suggestion that there might be something more to life. It sometimes seems the Church of England thinks God is just the ultimate 'good chap'.

Small wonder that so many English writers have preferred the dramatic certainties of Catholicism. You simply couldn't write a novel like Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory about a church built on the conviction that anything can be settled over a cup of tea.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.

So—a French garden, as far as I can tell, is a garden that gets tended. You know, my aunt, she walks around it slowly and bends down now and then to pull up some shit, or to stick some other stuff in somewhere. That's a French garden. An English garden is something that used to be a French garden but that no one does anything to anymore. So, it looks run-down. Things don't grow in proper lines. This is what they tell me. My

Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England.

In honor of the fair Kodak called the folding version of its popular model No. 4 box camera the Columbus. The photographs these new cameras created were fast becoming known as "snap-shots," a term originally used by English hunters to describe a quick shot with a gun.

CHEQUERS AND ITS FULL-MOON SURROGATE, Ditchley, were by now a regular weekend ritual for Churchill. These brief sojourns took him away from the increasingly dreary, bomb-worn vistas of London, and salved that need within his English soul for trees, hollows, ponds, and birdsong.

the queen a copy of Henry Watson Fowler's famous 1926 guide to the English language, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

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.

How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.

If an English writer cannot say what he has to say in English, and in simple English, depend upon it, it is probably not worth saying

It almost boosts your self-esteem being screamed at by someone with an English accent.

It gives one a reason to fight the French, certainly, sir." "I have never needed a reason, Mr Murray – it has always seemed the most natural of occupations to me. I have come to believe that the French were created merely so that the pugnacious English would have a legitimate target for their aggression.

Still, be that as it may, the young master was at sea sinking Froggies, and that was a good thing, it was what Froggies were for, when all was said and done; no doubt it was God's punishment on them for not being English.

Probert knew, as an absolute certainty, that the British way of life and thought was by far the best on Earth. All others could only aspire to be English. Thomas was speaking nonsense – he must be.

In 1522, William Tyndale began translating the Greek New Testament into English. Tyndale had the audacity to actually translate the term ekklesia rather than superimpose the widely accepted German term kirche. Instead of church, he used the term congregation. If that wasn't offensive enough, the Greek text led him to use elder instead of priest and repent instead of do penance.11

It seems to me that the English are never serious--they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious, which is sometimes maddening.

Personally, I am a nationalist, but my race is my nation, and I see all true Europeans as my racial brethren and part of my nation, be them Norwegian, Danish, or Swedish, French, German, or English, Russian, Polish, or Belorussian, or whatever.

There's inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references - history, language, culture, all this stuff - but to be well-versed in Western references as well.