Quotes About English

It was this document, validated by Guala and Marshal, which resurrected Magna Carta – the discarded pact of 1215. This development represented a critical step in English history, for without this reissue and those that followed in later years, the Great Charter would have been forgotten.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

The English approach to ideas is not to kill them, but to let them die of neglect.

I think every English actor is nervous of a Newcastle accent.

I did art history and English literature at Newcastle.

The English like eccentrics. They just don't like them living next door.

If you're an English actor and turn up in America, they don't have an opinion about where you sit. They have no idea what auditions to send you to, so they send you to everything.

But enough already of what grammarians will recognize as the third conditional: if + pluperfect + would.

english isn't a good language to express emotion through mostly i imagine because people try to speak english instead of trying to speak through it

Morris Halle was already working on a generative phonology of Russian in the 1950s, and we also worked together on the generative phonology of English, at first jointly with Fred Lukoff.

Some argue against the Rapture by saying the word doesn't even appear in the Bible, but it does. As I've said, we have to read it in the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible. There the Greek word harpazo is translated rapiemur, the proper tense of rapio, the root of our English words "rapt" and "rapture.

No one sleeps in Hell except as a possible defensive posture in retaliation during yet another punitive presentation of The English Patient.

You're in Ireland the summer after you left college and you're drinking at a pub near the castle where every day bus loads of English and American tourists come to kiss the Blarney Stone.

Ah, Houellebecq. I've only read him in English translations so I'm sure I'm not getting the full greatness of his work, but golly, he writes better sex scenes than anyone else alive.

In Hell, whenever the demons announce they're going to treat everyone to a big-name Hollywood movie, don't get too excited because it's always The English Patient or, unfortunately, The Piano. It's never The Breakfast Club.

Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.

Seriez-vous un iceberg ? On m'a dit beaucoup de mal des Anglaises, mais je vous préviens ! Notre soleil ne va pas tarder à vous faire fondre, d'autant plus qu'il s'allie à notre musique et à notre vin.

Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English!

And for some reason she held the sentence suspended without meaning in her mind's ear, "…quite enough for everybody at present," she repeated. After all the foreign languages she had been hearing, it sounded to her pure English. What a lovely language, she thought, saying over to herself again the common place words…

The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

Parties, he said, bored him—such were English aristocrats before marriage with intellect had adulterated the fine singularity of their minds.

I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that's about all.

The organs concerned in the production of English speech sounds are the larynx, the velum, the lips, the tongue (that punchinello in the troupe), and, last but not least, the lower jaw; mainly upon its overenergetic and somewhat ruminant motion did Pnin rely when translating in class passages in the Russian grammar or some poem by Pushkin. If his Russian was music, his English was murder.

We're English. There's no cure for that.