English Book Quotes

#1. He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

Matthew Arnold

#2. I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning, for that is sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He'll get better books afterwards.

Samuel Johnson

#3. Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#4. The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith's for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar.

Ali Smith

#5. I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn't that way growing up.

Tony Dungy

#6. The aim I have set before me in this book is to give back to English readers the understanding of and delight in this great poet which thrilled his contemporaries and early successors.

Janet Spens

#7. Catch-22 is the greatest satirical work in English since Erewhon ... remarkable ... This is a book that I could wish everyone to read. It is a book which should help us feel more clearly

Philip Toynbee

#8. I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

Edith Wharton

#9. I never thought I'd be a person who would want to write books ... I promise you not a single English teacher I've ever had would have thought that this would be going on right now.

Gary Vaynerchuk

#10. But this is exactly why I read
and don't belong to a book group
because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.

Peter Orner

#11. You are, without doubt, holding in your hands one of the best-introduced books in the English language. We hope you enjoy the Introduction to the New Edition that follows this Introduction to it and continue to read on even into the book itself.

Douglas Adams

#12. Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'.
"To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English," Peter said. "It's taken me most of today to get through a page.

Justin Cronin

#13. If there is anything that is likely to put me to sleep," he said, "it would be an English history book. So you can hold hands with a clear conscience." "I'm going with Nurse Burrows." "You can still hold hands." "I've no patience with you," she said patiently and faded backwards into the gloom.

Josephine Tey

#14. As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

Albert J. Nock

#15. What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

Aaron Swartz

#16. Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#17. In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.

Yayoi Kusama

#18. Why this book? In today's globalized world, it seems we forget things that happened only a decade ago. Thus, we repeat the mistakes of the past, unnecessarily.

Thomas Jerome Baker

#19. My brother, being an English gentleman, possesses a library in all his houses, though he never opens a book. This is called fidelity to ancient tradition.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#20. On handing the book back to my friend, the woman inquired "Is he gay?" No, said my friend. The woman pondered for a moment. "Is he English?" she asked.

Terry Eagleton

#21. The glorious insanities of the English language mean that you can do all sorts of odd and demeaning things to a book. You can cook it.

Mark Forsyth

#22. There's a huge and hungry market for the books on style and fashion in Russia, though the books should be done in Russian, not English since there are few readers who've master foreign languages well enough to buy foreign editions.

Alexander Vassiliev

#23. They were like English teachers who took the fun out of a perfectly good book by breaking it down into themes and sentence structures

Tawni O'Dell

#24. This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.

Arthur Golden

#25. If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book ... it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.

Tao Lin

#26. I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

George Bernard Shaw

#27. A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Malcolm Gladwell

#28. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.

Henry David Thoreau

#29. 'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English.

Natsuo Kirino

#30. I shall always feel respect for every one who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble which trying to write common English could cost one - And alas there yet remains the worst part of all correcting the press.

Charles Darwin

#31. One English nobleman and statesman read and reread a particular work of literature because it was the only book which allowed him to forget politics.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#32. Smith used English as one might use a code book, with tedious and imperfect translation for each symbol.

Robert A. Heinlein

#33. This book aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style.

William Strunk Jr.

#34. I had English grammar book and started to teach myself. I read 'Catcher in Rye,' in Russian. I was amazed at freedom in 'Catcher in Rye!' Freedom to have those perceptions of life!

Roustam Tariko

#35. The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

#36. Sometimes I forget when I read a book that it didn't exist in English first.

Ali Liebegott

#37. If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment.

Claud Cockburn

#38. The closest to my heart is not just one book - it's the whole series of novels, Indigo Diaries. The first volume, "Gods' Food," is already available in English.

Sahara Sanders

#39. 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.

Ernest Hemingway,

#40. The future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public - a reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of true literary civilization - which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad.

Wilkie Collins

#41. All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.

Ray Bradbury

#42. I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen
but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!

Robert Benchley

#43. You've got something that I don't have. Innocence. Ur eyes express it, & I can read everything in them". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

Olga Goa

#44. I have many, many editions of the books, and they are all rather different. In the end, the one I used was the most recent French translation. French suits the tales well, and it's a beautiful translation. The Italian one is good as well ... English has fallen short.

Marina Warner

#45. It was in the beginning of the month of November, 17
, when a young English gentleman, who had just left the university of Oxford, made use of the liberty afforded him, to visit some parts of the north of England; and curiosity extended his tour into the adjacent frontier of the sister country.

Walter Scott

#46. I was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends.

Claire Tomalin

#47. I saw a film today, oh boy,
The English army had just won the war,
A crowd of people turned away,
But I just had to look, having read the book ...

The Beatles

#48. I don't come from a family of readers - in fact, my parents are unable to read the books in English.

Christopher Castellani

#49. The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#50. Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

Roger Ebert

#51. Goodbye Darcy, goodbye Jean, goodbye stone cottage, scratchy towels, fields of wildflowers; good bye gorgeous Peak District ... OK English People, for your own good, get off the roads, here we come!

Susan Branch

#52. Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

Virginia Woolf

#53. I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they've made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.

Gary Shteyngart

#54. Always have a book to read, instead of indulging in vain conversation. Strive to learn English ... Remember this, that you cannot commit some loved sin in private, and perform the work of the ministry in public, with facility and acceptance.

Christmas Evans

#55. 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

#56. I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel ... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

Alan Bradley

#57. The worst letters come from retired high school English teachers. They will literally take a book and pick it to pieces and send me 14 pages of notes.

John Grisham

#58. The tea-kettle is as much an English institution as aristocracy or the Prayer-Book ...

Catharine Beecher

#59. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

Virginia Woolf

#60. The apartment was tiny, but neat: the bed was made; a few books (business books and a self-help book, all in English and all from the library) were stacked on a nightstand.

Patrick Hoffman

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

Marlon Brando

#62. English is much drier. You can get away with a lot less. Pathos, lyricism, these are things you have to tone down if you want the English version of the book to work.

Daniel Kehlmann

#63. Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.

Barack Obama

#64. You don't want to lose the foreign feel of a book entirely, but for me the prime requisite is to get it sounding good in English. If it sounds clumsy, readers will pounce on it of course.

Anthea Bell

#65. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

Pat Conroy

#66. 'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.

Edward P. Jones

#67. I give pleasure to you. Do not interfere..." #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

Olga Goa

#68. I cannot perceive that you're still a girl. Ur kisses don't seem so innocent. They just drive me crazy!" #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

Olga Goa

#69. In his New Yorker column of July 27, 1957, E. B. White praised the "little book" as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.

William Strunk Jr.

#70. As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.

Garrison Keillor

#71. He hums a little. He's a really old guy with an English accent, he might have a goatee, and he'll definitely be carrying around a really thick, boring book. You might be able to pry it from his decaying hands and beat him back to death with it. Or maybe just reading it to him would work.

Kasie West

#72. The attempts to command the climate and decide about the temperature on our planet are wrong and arrogant. I wrote a book about it which was published in English under the title 'Blue Planet in Green Shackles.'

Vaclav Klaus

#73. In many ways, 'What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World' is just one big thank-you note to my teachers. The book is dedicated to my fifth and sixth grade English teacher, Dr. Joseph D'Angelo, a massive force of erudition, martial artistry, culture, and love.

Taylor Mali

#74. What he says may be true for English, but why should I want to go into this God's house if only English are there? If God wanted us in this house than he would have sent our ancestors such a book.

Geraldine Brooks

#75. 'XIII' is a spy show. I think the comic book is a little too similar to 'The Bourne Identity.' I tried to take it away from that. I believe there was, many years ago, before the Bourne movies, a lawsuit that made it so they couldn't be published in English.

Roger Avary

#76. For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories ... But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry.

Paul Kane

#77. Book clubs are totally dope - like English class if you were allowed to read only books that you actually like and snack and sip while discussing them.

Sam Maggs

#78. I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

Anthony Bourdain

#79. Although I think the word "pleasure" is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

Olga Goa

#80. I will never know what it's like to have only one language in my head. I have the pleasure of being able to move back and forth between Spanish and English, and I incorporate both languages in my books.

Pat Mora

#81. I've always had a fondness for language ... English. Not that I use it correctly but I like words. I like books and I like poetry.. I like the written word ... and the sung word.

Joel Plaskett

#82. (Agent: This book doesn't work. Shane: You mean, in your opinion. Agent: I mean in English).

Jess Walter

#83. Problem was, all this is new. In English at school we study a grammar book by a man named Ronald Rideout, read Cider with Rosie, do debates on fox-hunting and memorize 'I Must Go Down to the Seas Again' by Jason Masefield. We don't have to actually think about stuff.

David Mitchell

#84. I was a terrible reader as a kid. I mean terrible. Super slow and very unfocused. It took me forever to read a book, and I remember being well into high school and still needing my mom to sit down and read aloud to me so I could pass my English tests and such.

John Corey Whaley

#85. When I began 'Wicked', I really thought of it entirely as a one-off, as the English say. There was no intention that there should ever be a follow up, because the subtitle was 'The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West'. She was dead and gone, as the book says, at the end.

Gregory Maguire

#86. Every free minute away from dance (my main focus) I was memorizing new English words, either showering, walking or on the toilet. I started reading English books even though I had very limited vocabulary.

Li Cunxin

#87. You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion:

Olga Goa

#88. 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