Quotes About English

Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent.

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.

At Harvard, I majored in English Literature.

I like everything to be dependable, heavy, English furniture.

It is a culture voice, but it is a very American culture voice, and I am very used to English culture voice. So I had to work like hell to flatten those R's.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

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?

All the while, though I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that 'they' cannot arrest you unless you have broken the law. It is a most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom.

The English will never develop into a nation of philosophers. They will always prefer instinct to logic and character to intelligence. But they must get rid of their downright contempt for 'cleverness'. They cannot afford it any longer. They must grow less tolerant of ugliness, and mentally more adventurous. And they must stop despising foreigners. They are Europeans and ought to be aware of it.

If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.

Meanwhile nothing happened, nothing ever happened. The English had got into the habit of saying that this wasn't a war, it was a bloody pantomime. We were hardly under direct fire from the Fascists. The only danger was from stray bullets, which, as the lines curved forward on either side, came from several directions. All the casualties at this time were from strays. Arthur Clinton got a mysterious bullet that smashed his left shoulder and disabled his arm, permanently, I am afraid.

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The histories I was given when I was a little boy started off by explaining in the naïvest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?' No

As for queueing-up, during the past five or ten years it has become what the psychologists call a conditioned reflex. If you put a dozen English people together, they form themselves into a queue almost instinctively.

THERE'S A KIND OF PEACEFULNESS IN THE NAMES OF ENGLISH COARSE FISH. ROACH, RUDD, DACE, BLEAK, BARBEL, BREAM, GUDGEON, PIKE, CHUB, CARP, TENCH. THEY'RE SOLID KIND OF NAMES. THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THEM UP HADN'T HEARD OF MACHINE-GUNS, THEY DIDN'T LIVE IN TERROR OF THE SACK OR SPENDING THEIR TIME EATING ASPIRINS, GOING TO THE PICTURES, AND WONDERING HOW TO KEEP OUT OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP.

The landlord was trying to explain that there were a great many English people in his house, all fighting duels or having hysterics.

Oh Lord! Don't, don't start rhapsodising over that cod again, darling! I can't bear it and I know you are going to! She laughed. You don't understand. It was because it was so typically English.

Now I see that it is Miss Rivenhall, whose beauty is entirely English; and that other one, also in the English estilo, but less beautiful. I do not think two chickens will be enough, so that man with the cold must eat

The Merchant said it was wonderful - a great contribution to the body of English literature. Personally, I would have preferred a pirate story.

Sunshine - sunshine! tedious, changeless, monotonous. Not that discreet English Sunshine which varies its charm with clouds, with rainbows, with golden mist... here the sun has ceased trying to please so venerable a world.

I was born in 1928, so in 1943, 1944, we had the war in Rome. There were a lot of hardships, a lack of food, many shortages. So when I worked with the Americans, the English, and the Canadians soon after the war, when I played with them, they paid me with food. That will give you an idea how widespread poverty was at that time.

I think English punk died in '79 or '80. Maybe '82 at the latest. As far as American punk goes, it wasn't the same as English punk. It wasn't a working-class movement that was protesting the conditions under which this class had to work. I don't think American punk ever died.

I want to be the first English WWE world champion.

I like English football, always have. It's just that people go on about the World Cup in 1986 and then I'm seen as the real bad boy.