About English Quotes

#1. Much is said about English severity, but not a word about Irish provocation.

Robert Peel

#2. In my first season I was learning about English football in a new team. I scored 13 which isn't bad, but I think I can do better.

Luis Garcia

#3. When just a kid, moved back to Canada and looking for a taste of England, I'd picked up a book of my Gram's, a dog-eared romance from the 'sixties about English hospital 'sisters' trying to get it on with the doctors, and thought it very shocking behaviour for nuns.

Roberta Pearce

#4. I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and ... ants. I can understand ants.

A.S. Byatt

#5. Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

Joe Haldeman

#6. With typical arrogance, the Anglos claimed to cherish freedom of speech but failed to recognize this right for anyone but themselves. Where did the Constitution say anything about English?

James Crawford

#7. I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it.

Margaret Halsey

#8. The more you know about English, the less you're likely to think there are unbreakable "rules" for a lot of things.

Bill Walsh

#9. What was it about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the sky were a diary?

Adam Johnson

#10. I will find you another long-forgotten Queen Mab poem in no time. Depend on it. I refuse to let Cody or anyone else know more about English Literature than me. So calm yourself, Elfish, and let an expert take over.

Martin Millar

#11. The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.

Stephen King

#12. What I like about Hollywood is that one can get along by knowing two words of English
SWELL and LOUSY.

Vicki Baum

#13. The typical Irish peasant ate about 10 pounds of potatoes each day and soon towered in physical size over their rural English equivalents who mainly ate bread.

Rashers Tierney

#14. My father was an Episcopal minister, and for 14 years my family lived in China, in a city called Wuchang. We four children spoke Chinese before we spoke English. We left when the communists came, in the early 1930s. I was about 5 years old.

Audrey Meadows

#15. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.

Ken Bruen

#16. The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#17. I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.

Lara Pulver

#18. We should not blur the lines between legal and illegal immigrants. Millions of people around the world have gone through the process to come here legally and they followed the rules that required them to pay a fee, learn English, and learn about American history and government.

Ken Calvert

#19. Films about the English monarchy, they tend to have a lavishness, sumptuous imagery, it's all very posh and rich.

Tom Hooper

#20. the moment he'd seen that female he'd forgotten his own name, most of his English vocabulary, and seventy-five percent of his sense of balance.
Instant. Cosmic. Attraction.

-Trez's thoughts about Selena

J.R. Ward

#21. [Dennis Mathis] was very sensitive about keeping the unique way that I spoke English - it had a lot of Mexicanisms or Mexican syntax. So you keep it in because it's adding something unique.

Sandra Cisneros

#22. The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?

John Rocker

#23. I don't know why that is, but English politics is just so overly white. It's very much about the class structure.

Daniel Radcliffe

#24. In an ideal world, the time English speakers devote to steeling themselves against, and complaining about, things like Billy and me, singular they, and impact as a verb would be better spent attending to genuine matters of graceful oral and written expression.

John McWhorter

#25. Below these words was the garden's name in English: EVENING MISTS. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.

Tan Twan Eng

#26. [About John Evershed] There is much in our medallist's career which is a reminder of the scientific life of Sir William Huggins. They come from the same English neighbourhood and began as amateurs of the best kind. They both possess the same kind of scientific aptitude.

Hugh Newall

#27. The way I think or sing about something is very different if it is in Spanish or English.

Prince Royce

#28. You'll be so busy with Bridge and what's-his-name that you'll forget all about your English mate, St. Clair."
"Ha! So you are English!" I poke him in the stomach.
He grabs my hand and we wrestle, laughing. "I claim ... no ... nationality.

Stephanie Perkins

#29. We always seem to be a bit surprised that our children are reflecting stuff that we are showing them. I don't know about you, but every movie that I saw when I was a kid, I emulated. I was Haley Mills for an entire summer and had an English accent.

Cheryl Ladd

#30. was like a disease, and these children whom I loved without caring about their skins or their backgrounds, they were tainted with the hateful virus which attacked their vision, distorting everything that was not white or English. I

E.R. Braithwaite

#31. I didn't understand how funny this play Much Ado About Nothing truly was until I became an English teacher and had to teach it. There is no wittier dialogue anywhere.

Dan Brown

#32. There is always that age-old thing about England and America being divided by a common language. You think that because we speak English and you speak English that you're bound to understand and like everything that we do. And of course you don't.

Rowan Atkinson

#33. I love the English way, which is not as capitalistic as it is in America. People don't talk about work and money. They talk about interesting things at dinner parties.

Gwyneth Paltrow

#34. A schoolchild should be taught grammar
for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.

E.B. White

#35. [O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.

C. Wright Mills

#36. I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

J.K. Rowling

#37. It's funny how a film about a murderous old English toff can help you.

Jim Broadbent

#38. The interesting thing about Sherlock is that he is himself a reflection of that very English duality. As a drug addict, he is a criminal. But he is also a crime fighter. That makes him an extremely potent character to personify the hypocrisy of a culture that is both moralistic and corrupt.

Rupert Everett

#39. China's cinema has been rising for some time; it has more exposure, so my chances of becoming internationally known are better. But the first thing I have to do is learn English. If I can grasp the language, then perhaps I can think about the U.S.

Ziyi Zhang

#40. After college, I did a bunch of different jobs - taught English in Mexico, worked in public radio, worked for a web design company - but there was something about documentaries that really attracted me.

Marshall Curry

#41. I didn't know anything about fashion. I couldn't believe it when I got here. I don't know how I'm sitting here right now speaking English.

Adriana Lima

#42. 'Ageism,' or whatever you want to call it, is a very English phenomenon. You don't get it too much in many other cultures. And no one says it about authors or poets or filmmakers. 'Oh, they're too old to make films or write books.'

Paul Weller

#43. MasterChef Junior for me was about working closely with these kids and getting them to reeducate their parents to understand that food is as important educationally as Math and English and it's important that we don't take it for granted.

Gordon Ramsay

#44. There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.

Anne Carson

#45. They looked and seemed like a perfect match in every way possible.
I wanted that. I wanted to find someone who belonged with me like the stars belonged with the sky. Someone I could get lost in, who would make me forget about reality for a while(...)

C.J. English

#46. Many people are intimidated by doctors ... People also feel stupid when they don't understand what a doctor's talking about the first time around, so they don't ask again. And let's be honest here, people. English is not a doctor's first language.

Erma Bombeck

#47. The English word thanks comes from the same root word as think. Maybe if leaders were more "thinkful" about the contribution of others, they would be more "thankful" to them.

John C. Maxwell

#48. The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But

Paul Kalanithi

#49. Until the early middle years of the sixteenth century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It's

Christopher Hitchens

#50. There are a lot of books about the passing of the English aristocracy, but the vast majority of Long Islanders don't understand their own backyard. It's a private preserve.

Nelson DeMille

#51. When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.

Ben Lerner

#52. Why did you tell her I'm your boyfriend? Why doesn't she know about your real one? - Timmy
He's English! And Mom ... Mom hates foreigners!
- Cat

Jeaniene Frost

#53. I know the English are terribly sentimental about the sea, but I can live without it.

Libba Bray

#54. I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.

Linus Pauling

#55. My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

Colm Toibin

#56. Pal, if you ever look up the word right in a dictionary, you'll find it's one of the oldest words in the English language. Even so, people have never stopped arguing about what it means. I suspect they always will.

Avi

#57. He'd tried to talk to you about anarchy yesterday but his English and your French conspired against the dialog.

Ian Rankin

#58. I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

Daniel Alarcon

#59. I have been learning English on the road since I started when I was 15, so it is a slow process but making some progress. Now I think I am much more comfortable with my English. However, it is difficult, still, when I speak about something that is not tennis.

Rafael Nadal

#60. About Grade 9 and Grade 10, I had a fantastic drama teacher, and it was one of the first subjects I actually felt that I was good at. I wasn't a mathematician. Didn't like science, any of those subjects. English and Drama were the two subjects that I loved and felt that I was good at.

Deborah Mailman

#61. Originally, I thought English was more my home. But Spanish is so much more romantic. I've had to learn new phrases. I've had to learn to be more secure about singing in Spanish. But I'm working on it.

La India

#62. She wouldn't be on the bus with him. She wouldn't roll her eyes at him in English. She wouldn't pick a fight with him just because she was bored. She wouldn't cry in his bedroom about the things he couldn't fix for her.

Rainbow Rowell

#63. My Geordie is probably just about as bad as my English.

George W. Bush

#64. Do I have to see movies and television about the English throne or the Holocaust every year? There are multiple multi-million dollar movies with the same backdrop. But our Holocaust - meaning Latino - aren't ever told.

Esai Morales

#65. Mom," said Peter, "nobody thinks you're a lackwit, if that's what you're worried about."
Lackwit? In what musty drawer of some dead English professor's dust-covered desk did you find that word? I assure you that never in my worst nightmares did I ever suppose that I was a lackwit.

Orson Scott Card

#66. English experience indicates that when the two great political parties agree about something it is generally wrong.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#67. Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.

Maya Angelou

#68. The words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language ... those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

Donald Miller

#69. English people are famous for never speaking out but only saying what they really feel about you behind your back. Americans believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I like exploring those, er, differences in national snippiness.

Rachel Johnson

#70. One of my goals as a professor of English is to teach students to recognize and think critically about what makes something art.

Andrew Hoberek

#71. My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.

Bernie Taupin

#72. My best friend Madison keeps a list on her phone of all of the different English slang that I say, so she has kind of like a translator so she can understand without having to ask me, "What on Earth are you talking about when you say 'nackered'?"

Emma Watson

#73. For a moment it seemed that her impeccably impractical education - in which she'd learned about Middle English and Duchamp's urinal and sub-Saharan droughts but had never been taught how to apply for a credit card or answer an office phone - wasn't useless after all.

Ralph Sassone

#74. When I was six or seven, we went to the nearest English primary school, St Weonards, about seven miles away. The teaching was good, and this was the start of my beginning to shine as a student.

Saul David

#75. I'm reminded of the lady governor of Texas who, during a controversy about bilingualism in the State House in Austin, said if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it was plenty good enough for her.

Christopher Hitchens

#76. A lot of people don't know enough about me. When I meet people who freak out about Game of Thrones, they don't even know that I can speak English.

Jason Momoa

#77. Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.

David Mamet

#78. When I was about 13 or 14, I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year's regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.

Victor Salva

#79. The mathematics of Malthus? A quick Internet search led him to information about a prominent nineteenth-century English mathematician and demographist named Thomas Robert Malthus, who had famously predicted an eventual global collapse due to overpopulation.

Dan Brown

#80. I think it's part of being English, particularly if you are middle-class - you're always looking to be reminded that you are no good and you are always actually embarrassed about being successful.

Chris Martin

#81. London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it's far from representative of what life in England is actually about.

Alan Moore

#82. I've always said, 'I am a selector, I am not defector' - the first few phrases in English I learned. I said I hate 'defector'; something defective about the people. It's a bad word.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

#83. Tanner: My dear Tavy, your pious English habit of regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people's necessities.

George Bernard Shaw

#84. I've concentrated for a long time on English films because I've got two kids but my oldest son is 11 and I think I'm going to be away for about four months of year now.

Sadie Frost

#85. It's just incredible. When you're French, coming from a non-English language country, you don't even dream about Oscar recognition or nominations. It's just beyond the dream. It's something very, very special and unique. It's the highest recognition any filmmaker could dream of.

Michel Hazanavicius

#86. What would you call them in English?" She thought about it for a moment. "Canadians,

Rick Riordan

#87. On the contrary, there is something pleasing about his mouth when he
speaks. And there is something of dignity in the way his trousers cling to those most English parts
of him.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#88. 'Hot Fuss' was all based on fantasy. The English influences, the makeup - they were what I imagined rock was. I'm a dreamer, you know? So I dug into that dream and made 'Hot Fuss.' But hearing people call us 'the best British band from America' made me wonder about my family and who I was.

Brandon Flowers

#89. It hapens very often that parents think they are worred about the progress a boy is making. they do not realise that all boys are numskulls with o branes which is not surprising when you look at the parents really the whole thing goes on and on and there is no stoping it it is a vicious circle.

Geoffrey Willans

#90. 'The English Patient' was a huge turning point in my career and my life; it became this huge thing. But the whole Oscar build-up got completely out of control; I spent more time talking about that film than I spent making it!

Kristin Scott Thomas

#91. Unless people can express themselves well in ordinary English, they don't know what they are talking about.

Russell L. Ackoff

#92. Guy was saying, "What the hell is it about you that attracts murder and mayhem?"
"Something in my body language?"
He groaned. "That was bad - even for you.

Josh Lanyon

#93. Writing about our gods in English is unnatural, but I believe language is just a carrier - a means to an end.

Amish Tripathi

#94. Thinking is thinking. It happens in spite of a person. ... I don't have any choice. This stuff I'm talking about is on my mind whether or not I want it to be. English Creek

Ivan Doig

#95. Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

Ruth Rendell

#96. I remember reports that the American and English newspapers were very happy about the fact that so many were killed in Dresden. There are many instances of barbarity and cruelty on the part of the Allies which I could tell you.

Julius Streicher

#97. Peter is ... adjusting. He's back in school, and he's doing quite well. I wish you could find it in your heart to forgive him."
"I've got this funny resentful streak about people who try to kill me.

Josh Lanyon

#98. The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.

Bernard Bailyn

#99. I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and snow.

Jean Rhys

#100. His poem is like a play in a room through the windows of which a distant view can be seen over a large part of the English traditions about the world of their original home. (Tolkien on the author of Beowulf)

J.R.R. Tolkien