English Books Quotes

#1. One of the great defects of English books printed in the last century is the want of an index.

Lafcadio Hearn

#2. I've never seen an 'English' books section in, well, an English bookshop, but in Scotland, most bookshops have a set of shelves dedicated to Scottish authors.

Sara Sheridan

#3. So it was that she knew she liked him, loved him as they said in the soppy English books, you were shamed and a fool to say that in Scotland.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

Richard Flanagan

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. This year my goal will be to learn new vocabulary in English and to read as much as possible books.

Deyth Banger

#11. Not all of E. Nesbit's children's books are fantasies, but even the most realistic somehow seem magical. In her holiday world, nobody ever goes to school, though all the kids know their English history, Greek myths, and classic tales of derring-do.

Michael Dirda

#12. I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.

Tom Glazer

#13. Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they've been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It's back on the shelves.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

#14. 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

#15. I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

Isabel Allende

#16. If I had my way books would not be written in English but in an exceedingly difficult secret language ... This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors ... who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Robertson Davies

#17. 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

#18. He was keen to use English as well as French in daily conversation, writing letters in English and commissioning translations of French and Latin books.

Ian Mortimer

#19. Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging. The law remained on the books until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII broke with the Vatican.

Mark Kurlansky

#20. In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore."10 Hayles teaches English; the students she's talking about are students of literature.

Nicholas Carr

#21. Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best.

Meg Cabot

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. I most likely like books which are out of my language... English... for example is a great example - Not my native language, but I enjoy the covers and how the words sound.

Deyth Banger

#25. He wished he had never come to London. He wished he had never undertaken to revive English magic. He wished he had stayed at Hurtfew Abbey, reading and doing magic for his own pleasure. None of it, he thought, was worth the loss of forty books.

Susanna Clarke

#26. 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

#27. I worked in a bookstore in Oslo, importing the English-language books.

Per Petterson

#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. During the 1980s, when Japan's economy was roaring and people were writing books with titles like 'Japan is Number One,' most Japanese college students didn't make the effort to become fluent in English.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#30. '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

#31. There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated. - Roger Mifflin

Christopher Morley

#32. I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.

Stephen Fry

#33. I'm into books - I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

Taron Egerton

#34. No hot guy should be allowed to have an English accent and drive a motorcycle.
Not to mention wear the leather jacket or sport the cool shades. Hot guys should be forced into footie pajamas.

Jandy Nelson

#35. 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

#36. I won't lie!
Probably from books you have saw that I'm not good at English, probably because I don't live in such country which this language is important or let's say to be native. But as for now I can't do a lot of for that!

Deyth Banger

#37. 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,

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

Olga Goa

#39. But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"
Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.

Olaf Stapledon

#40. In 1990, I was an undergraduate freshman archeology major sneaking over to the English building and unearthing an amazing repository of books I'd never even suspected. By 1998, I'd have my Ph.D.

Stephen Graham Jones

#41. He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.

Katherine Rundell

#42. 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.

Virginia Woolf

#43. I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family - poor, in fact.

Madhur Bhandarkar

#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. Books provide a handy shorthand when Rory's mostly MIA father, Christopher, is first introduced to viewers. Christopher's offer to buy Rory the Compact Oxford English Dictionary she covets is sincere; his lack of ability to follow through on his good intentions is Christopher in a nutshell.

Jennifer Crusie

#46. She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#47. For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages.

F. Sionil Jose

#48. Why don't these translation books just include general phrases that could be applied in a variety of situations like, "Say nothing unless it's in English"?

Joe Cawley

#49. At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me.
I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

Alison Bechdel

#50. 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

#51. I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

Pat Conroy

#52. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

Vladimir Nabokov

#53. The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.

Lev Grossman

#54. 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

#55. The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me ... by newspapers and the Bible.

Van Wyck Brooks

#56. 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

#57. We have a host of English teachers in the family. My mum is an English teacher, and so are my dad, my aunt and my uncle. I have grown up with family writing competitions, and I can't remember a birthday or Christmas present that didn't include books.

Alexandra Adornetto

#58. 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

#59. There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

Anthony Trollope

#60. I still feel threatened by academics, but my books have a lot of academic in-jokes and everybody assumes I went to university and studied English.

Jasper Fforde

#61. '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

#62. 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

#63. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

#64. Why do elites hate the poor? It's xenophobia. They don't know any poor people - except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don't speak English.

P. J. O'Rourke

#65. It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that's not true at all any more. It's one of the world's fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English.

Aravind Adiga

#66. Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.

Julia Glass

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

Olga Goa

#68. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!

Mary Gordon

#69. 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

#70. I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.

A.S. Byatt

#71. I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones.

Spencer Boldman

#72. I thought that strange syntax was the language of story books. I didn't realize those were poor translations ... English from Edwardian times.

Sandra Cisneros

#73. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

Malcolm X

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children's books, and so I did.

Dav Pilkey

#79. Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

David Guterson

#80. Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works.

Kate Williams

#81. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus. "Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist" [The Miracle of Language, page 54].

Bill Bryson

#82. Writing was something I have always been interested in. I've grown up in a household full of books, with both my parents English teachers and very booky.

Alexandra Adornetto

#83. So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had
gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing
incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if
plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

Michael Ondaatje

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

Olga Goa

#85. 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

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

Christopher Castellani

#87. My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word.

Jorge Luis Borges

#88. Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.

Antonio Munoz Molina

#89. 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