English Conversation Quotes

#1. The true mark of English conversation is not being able to tell when you've been insulted. I think the more sophisticated society becomes, the more it hides behind the masks it manufactures.

Christopher Fowler

#2. Sometime I'll get around to asking why the English nobility have so blasted many names that a conversation about them is like reading a Russian novel. I have a private suspicion it's done on purpose to confuse foreigners.

Jeanne M. Dams

#3. To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

William Hazlitt

#4. To be honest, I couldn't hold a conversation with anybody in any language other than English - and that's a struggle sometimes!

Phil Collins

#5. A conversation in English in Finnish and in French can not be held at the same time nor with indifference ever or after a time.

Gertrude Stein

#6. In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

Stephen Leacock

#7. My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets - no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Philip Roth

#8. Isn't it fascinating that he mainly dates women with limited English? But I guess it prevents a silly thing like conversation from interfering with sex.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

#9. When nature called, the men would relieve themselves in a pot at the sideboard without interrupting their conversation, an English custom instituted not so much for convenience as to preempt any excuse for the weak of stomach or head to sneak out before the drinking was finished.

Nina Burleigh

#10. Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.

Henry James

#11. The language of the internet is English, and an overwhelming proportion of the global computer chatter also originates from America, influencing the content of global conversation.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#12. The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not seemed polite to be present when anything so American was being discussed.

Michael Frayn

#13. Do not look so surprised, my dear," he said with a grin. "I might be a useless aristocrat, but I'm not a complete simpleton. I can certainly carry on a conversation about which word is the best English translation for what I wish to do to your mouth just now.

Manda Collins

#14. One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one's native language in conversation and in reading or one does not. What Sophomore English does (or tries to do) is little more than the naming of parts.

Stephen King

#15. Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

Ann Patchett

#16. The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion - unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged.

Henry Steele Commager

#17. 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

#18. One cultivates one's life, one's friends, one's means, one's hopes. One goes from place to place, from triumph to triumph, in search of ambition and ambition's remedy as though in flight across some imagined map, the subject of a conversation in a comfortable English room.

Jesse Ball

#19. The allegation that English girls had no conversation must be true; but theirs was a SPEAKING silence. Their eyes and smiles were eloquent! She hoped it would teach their own girls that they need not chatter like magpies.

Edith Wharton

#20. English is the product of a Saxon warrior trying to make a date with an Angle bar-maid, and as such is no more legitimate than any of the other products of that conversation.

H. Beam Piper

#21. Her English was sweet, an effort for her, anachronistic and unpractised.

Ruth Ahmed

#22. English tradition debars from dinner-table conversation almost all topics that might interest the conversers and insists upon strict adherence to banalities.

Elspeth Huxley

#23. 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

#24. When I'm on television, I'm talking to millions of people, so the conversation is totally different. My words are different. My diction is different because now I'm really talking American English and not homeboy English.

Keyshawn Johnson

#25. Though her grasp of English was modest and his Italian non-existent, their rapport was at once intuitive and intimate, founded more on physical attraction and a shared love of the outdoors than meaningful conversation.

Robert Radcliffe