Top 100 English How To Quotes
#1. If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
Oscar Wilde
#2. I don't see how English as we use it in Europe can be revivified. It's like Latin must have been in about A.D. 300, tired and used up. All one can do is press very hard stylistically to make it glow.
John Banville
#3. Suddenly I was a kid in the hall standing outside my locker about to head to Math. But that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth. That's when all the real things were said.
Marisha Pessl
#4. After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort.
Patrick Rothfuss
#5. I bareley knew how to say "my name is," "please" and "thank you," or "I don't speak english," never mind understanding a Newfoundlander talking to me!
Sergei Ivantchev
#6. You mustn't let men drive you to mangling the English language, no matter how sweet they are.
Marisa De Los Santos
#7. Speak English at this table or I will fire you so fast you'll wind up standing at the airport wondering how you got from here to there without any goddamn pants on.
Mira Grant
#8. Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky Gives us free scope; and only backward pulls Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. How much I could do if I only tried. * (1803-1873) English dramatist, novelist, and politician.
Napoleon Hill
#9. I met people that I couldn't talk to - they didn't speak Spanish or English - but they knew my songs. That's what I love, the music has gone past where I thought it would get to. That's the power of music, how it can travel and break language barriers.
Prince Royce
#10. Maybe his shifting isn't just physical. Maybe it applies to his feelings too, because I don't see how he can walk around eating candy at Luna Park as we take my English teacher practically hostage.
Zoraida Cordova
#11. You know, I still can't get my head around what happened to Ana. She was there last week. She lent me a pen in English class. How can someone go from lending a pen to being dead?
Lang Leav
#12. If I spoke no English, my world would be limited to the Japanese-speaking community, and no matter how talented I was, I could never do business, seek employment or take part in public affairs outside that community.
S.I. Hayakawa
#13. I am making sure, as the governor of a territory, that our kids speak fluent English. But having said that, I will tell my wife I love her in Spanish, and I will pray in Spanish, and no one from Washington should come down here and tell us how to go about it.
Luis Fortuno
#14. When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn't speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they're not very forgiving. 'If you don't speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?'
Kangana Ranaut
#15. Never had a decent report in his life!" Tony repeated, hardly able to believe the words. He was thinking, in shocked surprise, that even Tante Bettina did not know how mad the English could be.
Constance Savery
#16. Because I'm English, I try not to make any purely American references, because I want to limit how much I'm pretending to be American.
James Hunter
#17. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.
Elliott Colla
#18. You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That's what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.
John Fowles
#19. I came to New York in 1986. My father didn't think it was a good idea. I didn't know how I found it, but I went to Hunter College. I had no money and I couldn't speak English.
Francisco Costa
#20. It was him taught Idi Amin's lads how to extract voluntary confessions with the aid of an electric cattle-prod. Our chum likes them English and he likes them with a dirty past. He
John Le Carre
#21. One is not born English without knowing how to converse easily about the weather.
Deanna Raybourn
#22. How fortunate that it was an 'unconventional' party, where formalities are ruled out! On this basis Aziz found the English ladies easy to talk to, he treated them like men. Beauty would have troubled him, but Mrs Moore was so old and Miss Quested so plain that he was spared this anxiety.
E. M. Forster
#23. Linguists aim to describe language while teachers prescribe how English or any other language should be properly used.
Adrian J. Williams
#24. If I wouldn't of spent so much time shooting spit wads at my English teacher I'd know how to punctuate good thing I normally write poetry.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#25. Our English people are much addicted to raising idols, and then revenging themselves on their own idolatry by knocking down and demolishing the poor bits of wood and stone that they had worshipped as gods. How many literary reputations have been so treated!
Mary Russell Mitford
#26. There may be no more-radioactive term in the English language than what we now almost always refer to as the 'n-word' - itself a coy means of linguistic sidestepping that is a sign of how perilous it is to utter the thing in full, even in conversations about language.
Jeffrey Kluger
#27. Curiouser and curiouser! Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).
Lewis Carroll
#28. In fact, when I met Kit Harington first, he was pretty much feeling how I'm feeling today - at a photo shoot and you've had no sleep. He was just a really nice, English, down-to-earth guy. No pretense, nothing.
Max Irons
#29. I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.
Alan Furst
#30. He couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our development by a good five years.
Christopher Isherwood
#32. How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
Michael Ondaatje
#33. It's how the English run their courts. They sacrifice innocents, thinking to keep evil at bay, and call it a kind of justice. But they are no more just than this pole is a man.
Kathleen Kent
#34. The English know how to make the best of things. Their so-called muddling through is simply skill at dealing with the inevitable.
Winston Churchill
#35. Nothing in my younger life could have told me I would have needed to know how to speak English.
Omar Sy
#36. When the student has her voice under complete control, it is safe to take up the lyric repertoire of Mendelssohn, Old English Songs, etc. How simple and charming they are!
Alma Gluck
#37. As a rule the Holloywood pattern for English actors is simple. They are delighted to go, they are told there is a lot of work for them if they stick it out, they tell everyone how fabulous it is, they spend all their money - and then they come home. It seems to take from two to six years.
Julian Fellowes
#38. In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Aaron Lazar
#39. The basic skills of math, English and writing are not enough, ... You must develop a basic system of values to form and guide the use of these skills. The true test will not be what you learned in college, but how you used what you learned.
Jim Rogers
#40. But the English are different, and they don't know how to be other than different.
Larry McMurtry
#41. As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.
John McWhorter
#42. It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. Sometimes I'll go by and there are a couple of swans, the next day it's a few ducks. I'd like to stop there every day for a year and capture how it changes, then put it all together to create an incredible image of a traditional English scene.
Graeme Le Saux
#44. Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob'. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.
Helen Macdonald
#45. It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.
Stephen Fry
#46. Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.
Douglas Coupland
#47. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical.
("How to Write with Style". Essay, 1985)
Kurt Vonnegut
#48. Can't I?" he said. "Did you know that they fertilized crops with human ash? After the war, the tomatoes were the size of an infant's head." He gave the words the same inflection that his grandfather did, only in English. They had a new but not unfamiliar sound on his tongue. He knew how to say them.
Boris Fishman
#49. It's more believable that a cop would get involved in solving these murders. I mean, you're talking about writing a series. How believable is it that this Hollywood gossip columnist is going to keep stumbling on all these murders?
Josh Lanyon
#50. I learned how to horseback ride in English style, which is very hard, by the way. I had no idea how challenging it was. I've always ridden horses, but Western is like riding a horse in a rocking chair, as opposed to English, where you have to balance and hold on with your legs.
Minka Kelly
#51. Thanks. I forgot how to flip off the English. I'll use the correct hand gesture next time."
"My pleasure. Always happy to educate.
Stephanie Perkins
#52. I learned English at school, or at least that's how it started. Also, in Holland - as opposed to some other European countries - we don't dub anything, so as a kid growing up, always watching English and American movies in their original language really helped.
Michiel Huisman
#53. Those English and Scottish know how to do accents.
Joey McIntyre
#54. Dejardins was so stunned, he momentarily forgot how to speak English. Ce n'est pas possible. On ne pourrait pas-
Rick Riordan
#55. How do you English Socialists believe in Empire like that?' Steele said to Holmes. 'Empire is inimical to Democracy and it has no right to exist in a free world.
James Aldridge
#56. 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
#57. You see how Spanish, Italians, Portuguese play football. I don't say they are perfect, I say English football has a few things to learn from them in the same way they have a lot of things to learn from English football.
Jose Mourinho
#58. 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
#59. Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent.
Ishmael Beah
#60. The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else
Gustavo Perez Firmat
#61. In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#62. We try to magnify the difference between Americans and the English. In real life they like the same music and dress the same. It's really much more similar than anyone thinks or how we show it.
Amanda Bynes
#63. The mistakes were made by people who did not know how to wield the concepts University, division and team-spirit. Their puzzles arose from inability to use certain items in the English vocabulary.
Anonymous
#64. You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.
Marshall McLuhan
#65. In life, you have to take the pace that love goes. You don't force it. You just don't force love, you don't force falling in love, you don't force being in love - you just become. I don't know how to say that in English, but you just feel it.
Juan Pablo Galavis
#66. I ram my phone back in my pocket and reread the same page in Hamlet for the thirteenth time. I still don't see how this is supposed to be English. I have no clue what these people are saying.
Rachel Harris
#67. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#68. Cure is one of the most precious words in the English language. It's a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn't so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children's children?
Lauren DeStefano
#69. Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
#70. 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
#72. The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.
Robert Fitzgerald
#73. I was in the fashion shows in Milan; I was seventeen, I was doing like 100 shows. People were asking, 'How does it feel to be the model of the moment?' It was hard for me to answer as myself. I barely spoke English.
Gisele Bundchen
#74. I came to Los Angeles for the first time in 1994. I spoke no English. I only knew how to say two sentences: 'How are you?' and 'I want to work with Johnny Depp.'
Penelope Cruz
#75. You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?
Theresa May
#76. 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
#77. Well, I'm trilingual myself. I am, I know how to speak Spanish, English, obviously, and I speak pretty good Ebonics.
Cam Newton
#78. Yandex translation from Croatian to English: Nomadom was the time when the ratio of beauty began to think about how about love than between two parts, in which opposites attract only magical powers, and the same ratio is equal to the lords and architecture and nature.
Jasna Horvat
#79. English and Gym. That's it. Look, do you know how difficult it is to write about being at school convincingly? It's been years since Stephfordy graduated, so it'll save us all a lot of time and effort if we just stick to two real subjects...
Stephfordy Mayo
#80. But the nation's business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches.
Hilary Mantel
#81. How could the Rice Ring go on skinning the unfortunate peasant if it hadn't the Government behind it? The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English - or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.
George Orwell
#82. An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.
Stendhal
#83. The truth of the matter is, that most English people don't know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants.
Douglas Adams
#84. English football has just had a transfer window imposed for the first time, so it will be interesting to see how managers cope with the squads they have until it re-opens.
David Ginola
#85. In a war the last thing the English know is how to practice fair play.
Adolf Hitler
#86. It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, "depression" to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.
Andrew Solomon
#87. Do not suppose, dearest Sir, that I am so short-sighted as to destroy my life by English preaching, or any other preaching. St. Paul did much good by his preaching, but how much more by his writings.
Henry Martyn
#88. 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
#89. Even on the first day we invaded Plover's house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they're too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely.
Lev Grossman
#90. The short English miles are delightful for walking. You are always pleased to find, every now and then, in how short a time you have walked a mile, though, no doubt, a mile is everywhere a mile, I walk but a moderate pace, and can accomplish four English miles in an hour.
Karl Philipp Moritz
#91. I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic. I also just have a good feeling for how words are made and formed in English and the etymologies that give you prefixes and suffixes.
Michael Chabon
#92. What I appreciated was the fact that the script delved into how Australians were - and still are - condescended to by the English.
Geoffrey Rush
#93. There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Alan Jay Lerner
#94. How come "burbled" gets to be in the Oxford English Dictionary but "tulgy" doesn't? Hm?
Mike Tucker
#95. When I first came to this country, I didn't know how to speak English.
Wilmer Valderrama
#96. Person says to you, "How do you do?" he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, "How do I do what?" The complexities of the English language are
Bill Bryson
#97. When Jerry Lewis and I were big, we used to go to parties, and everybody thought I was big-headed and stuck up, and I wasn't. It was because I didn't know how to speak good English, so I used to keep my mouth shut.
Dean Martin
#98. A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You're always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare.
Ethan Hawke
#99. Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.
Louis Kronenberger
#100. And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking
how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe
Pasquale Tursi said, only, Yes.
Jess Walter
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