Quotes About English

You can't specify what you're used for; you go where there's a need. The majority of willed bodies wind up in the anatomy department. Almost none end up in the English department.

I do not know,' said the man, 'what the custom of the English may be; but it is the custom of the Irish to hate villains.

I do not know what the custom of the English may be, but it is the custom of the Irish to hate villains

There is nothing that requires more precision, and purity of expression, than to write in a familiar style,' as the great English essayist William Hazlitt put it nearly two hundred years ago. 'To write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity...' To me these are the cardinal virtues of strong, convincing English prose.

Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer advantages.

English rain feels obligatory, like paperwork. It dampens already damn days and slicks the stones.

Although it was very cold, he wore no coat. I think some English people think coats are for the weak.

It was a deathtrap, a meandering thread of madness. It suggested that there was something about English people that she may never understand.

They're English," David said, sitting on the bed. "That keep calm and carry on thing is real. You know. Don't talk about stuff that's bad. Talk about tennis! That's how they are.

Built like a linebacker, with a square jaw, broad features, and a gray comb-over, Netanyahu was smart, canny, tough, and a gifted communicator in both Hebrew and English. (He'd been born in Israel but spent most of his formative years in Philadelphia, and traces of that city's accent lingered in his polished baritone.)

If you turned in a paper with writing on it, you were guaranteed a hook from Jake Epping of the LHS English Department, and if the writing was organized into actual paragraphs, you got at least a B-minus.

You'd think that the ability to write lucid prose would be the bottom line for any publishing novelist, but it is not so... You would expect that proofreaders and copy editors would pick this sort of stuff up even if the writers of such embarrassing English do not, but many of them seem as illiterate as the writers they are trying to bail out.

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time.

freshmen. Even among English speakers, then, geocentric terms may be used when the terrain offers a conspicuous visual frame of reference

according to the transition probabilities of English. Remember Chomsky's sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. He contrived it not only to show that nonsense can be grammatical but also to show that improbable word sequences can be grammatical. In English texts the probability that the word colorless is followed by the word green is surely zero. So is the probability that green is followed by ideas, ideas by sleep, and sleep by furiously.

A definition is a dictionary's explanation of the meaning of an English word using other English words, intended to be read by a whole person, applying the entirety of his or her intelligence and language skills.

The laws of cricket tell of the English love of compromise between a particular freedom and a general orderliness, or legality.

I love English girls! I adore all their different accents. Who knows, I could find a British girlfriend on my travels!

English poet John Milton in Paradise Lost.

My father and he had one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.

Sai qual è il nostro problema, in quanto europei? Che vogliamo continuare a essere noi stessi senza smettere di essere il Tutto. Pretendiamo di globalizzare la nostra individualità. Ma il mondo ha sempre meno bisogno di individui, di razze, di nazioni, di lingue. Quello di cui ha bisogno è che tutti sappiamo l'inglese e, se possibile, che siamo moderatamente liberali. Che a Babele si parli inglese e avanti la Torre, dice il mondo.

TEN GREATEST ENGLISH POETS Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning. TEN GREATEST ENGLISH ESSAYISTS Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.

A Pronoun is a word used for or instead of a noun to keep us from repeating the same noun too often. Pronouns, like nouns, have case, number, gender and person. There are three kinds of pronouns, personal, relative and adjective.

All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection.