Top 93 English Old Quotes
#1. I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#2. The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.
Karl Marx
#3. I'd always been the confident guy in school. I was good in math and English, but I was still shy. I couldn't get up and speak in front of people. I was asked to do it when I was 10 years old and I burst out crying.
Chris Vance
#4. 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
#5. There, Clover found the "gardens and great trees and old cottages ... so beautiful" that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, "this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unreal, eccentric, and taken out of novels.
Natalie Dykstra
#6. God Child is a free and inspirational translation of Adam. Adam means 'human', not 'man'. The Hebrew for 'man' is 'aish'. In English man can mean both man and human, which may have caused the confusion in the first place. If Adam isn't the first male Homo sapiens, who or what is he?
Stefan Emunds
#8. But the citizens of Cincinnati loved their Reds because they won, no matter what their addresses had been the year before. They rooted for the Old-English 'C' on the players' shirts.
John Thorn
#9. It's Smith, actually.' Dr Smith smiled, bowing. 'I've remembered that my name is Smith. Almost definitely. Good old English name. Hopefully means 'noble valiant warriot' and not 'he who hits kittens with a hammer.' You'd be surprised the derivations of common surnames in the English countryside ...
James Goss
#10. 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
#11. The crowds at West Ham haven't been rewarded by results, but they keep turning up because of the good football they see. Other clubs will suffer from the old bugbear that results count more than anything. This has been the ruination of English soccer.
Ron Greenwood
#12. All of us together were of a generation born of old country people who spoke English with an accent and prayed in another language, who drank red wine and cooked their food in the old country way, and peeled apples and pears after dinner.
Robert Laxalt
#13. The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.
Salman Rushdie
#14. When I was a kid, I loved watching kung fu movies - in San Francisco, we had 'Kung Fu Theater' on TV on Saturdays, and they'd air old Shaw Brothers movies with English dubbing, things like that.
Daniel Wu
#15. I'd love to have been in things like 'The Jewel in the Crown,' but of course they're terribly old English. I can do that. But I'm not that.
Julia McKenzie
#16. Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennessee Williams had for Memoirs. There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, "My tits are on fire").
Christopher Bram
#17. A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.
J.B. Priestley
#18. 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
#19. In Old English they don't say I had a dream, but there's another usage of the word - "life is but a dream," to be corny about it. It's implied with eyes wide open, rather than asleep. But I'm not a philosopher to explain myself. I wish I could. Maybe that's why I'm a musician.
Tom Verlaine
#20. 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
#21. The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern.
Walter Bagehot
#22. It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.
Geraldine Brooks
#23. I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.
Ashwin Sanghi
#24. Fuckyou-ish?" "The English dialect of the ancient language 'fuckyou.' Very old. Dignified even.
Celia Kyle
#25. I've loved 'Vanity Fair' since I was 16 years old. You know, we're all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.
Mira Nair
#26. We all know the old expression, "I'll work my thoughts out on paper." There's something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes.
David McCullough
#27. I was looking for a name with an old English sound, very easy to pronounce in every language and easy to remember. At the beginning I used J. P. Tod's, but then in 1999 it was shortened since too many people were asking who was Mr. J. P. Tod's.
Diego Della Valle
#28. This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker.
Annie Besant
#29. I was 23 years old, a freshman at university, and there I was, on the first day, sitting in a remedial English class. I was so ashamed I almost got up and left, but somehow I knew inside that if I ran away from this, I would hate myself forever.
Bill Cosby
#30. In my time first cousins did not meet like strangers. But we are learning modesty from the Americans, and old English ways are too gross for us.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
#31. Here we are, then, once more back at the old doctrine - Laissez faire. Let us translate it into blunt English, and it will read, Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way.
William Graham Sumner
#32. Language and History in Viking Age England: Language Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnbout, 2002).
F. Donald Logan
#33. 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
#34. Using the passive voice is always very helpful. Mind you, a lot of that propaganda English emanates from here. The British establishment has always used the passive voice. It's been a weapon of discourse so those who committed terrible acts in the old empire could not be identified.
John Pilger
#35. Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)
Gilbert Highet
#36. Having spent all of my decision-making years as a Pagan of one stripe or another, I have long found it condescending at best to assume one cannot worship the old gods or believe in magick without breaking out the leather bracers, wings, or Ye Broken Olde English.
Thomm Quackenbush
#37. Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime at Oxford, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.
Philip Zaleski
#38. Ah, fairest maiden, thine beauty doth maketh mine loins stir, and mine cup runneth over.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#39. The old lady told me that all the girls in the village of Annezin prayed every night for the War to end, and for the English to go away - as soon as their money was spent. And that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.
Robert Graves
#40. I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.
Norman Douglas
#41. Papers there were in the chest, and parchments, and stiff untanned skins, written in English and Latin and the old Cumric tongue: Morgan was born, Morgan was married, Morgan became a knight, Morgan was hanged. Here lay the history of the house, shameful and glorious.
John Steinbeck
#42. America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.
Ahmet Ertegun
#43. The only way I thought I could do a greatest hits album is to do it in a prison where they have no f**king idea who I am. I'd do what I consider the best of those old, early CDs before I did DVDs. A women's prison would be even better, but it has to be English-speaking.
Doug Stanhope
#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. Hockey historians say the handshake dates to English settlers in Canada, who preached an upper-class version of sportsmanship in the 19th century. Soon, tough kids in urban and prairie rinks began imitating imagined dukes and earls of the old country.
George Vecsey
#46. In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable.
Rory Stewart
#47. I know, of course, he said, that bacon for breakfast is an English institution, almost as old as parliamentary government. But still, don't you think we might occasionally have a change, Dorothy?
George Orwell
#48. Out here we speak Malspeak, a mangle of English and old languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian. Dialects from a time when the land was defined by many borders. Now there's only one that matters. And I am on the wrong side of it.
Georgia Clark
#49. When I was old enough, I was 21 years of age, I decided to come to America. I did it illegally, so I jumped the border. I didn't speak any English.
Cesar Millan
#50. The fact that [English] has shed most of the old grammatical forms which time has rendered useless and scarcely intelligible, has made English a model, pointing the way which must be followed in building the Interlanguage ...
Sylvia Pankhurst
#51. English is such a deliciously complex and undisciplined language, we can bend, fuse, distort words to all our purposes. We give old words new meanings, and we borrow new words from any language that intrudes into our intellectual environment.
Willard Gaylin
#52. I'm old-school English, so I suppose I'm quite protective - especially of time. Now that I'm a father, every moment is precious.
Orlando Bloom
#53. We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
Julie Taymor
#54. I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.
Drew Barrymore
#55. It was decorated with Japanese fans and Chinese lanterns, which gave it a very Old English effect.
Saki
#56. an 'old English lady'. Henry, though, had other
Thomas Penn
#57. I do tend to be an analyzer. I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.
Cynthia Nixon
#58. Look, Paul. I appreciate what you're telling me, but I gave Jake my word. Not to mention the fact, he'd throw my ass in jail if he found out I tried to go around him."
"He wouldn't, you know," he said. "Jake's a pussycat."
Yeah, just a big old saber-toothed tiger.
Josh Lanyon
#59. As for poetry 'belonging' in the classroom, it's like the way they taught us sex in those old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If it I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk; & if I had taken college English seriously, I would have become an accountant.
Jerome Rothenberg
#60. What Rob Brezsny does with words is grammarye, the Old English term for magic. With his strange brew of macho feminism and poetic rationalism, Brezsny weaves a yarn crazy enough to be true and real enough to subvert the literalist virus of cynicism now immobilizing the collective mindscape.
Antero Alli
#61. My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
Frederik Pohl
#62. I've always used Old English in certain songs.
Erik Rutan
#63. The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.
Orson Scott Card
#64. '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
#65. It's funny how a film about a murderous old English toff can help you.
Jim Broadbent
#66. It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#67. Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.
Edmund Morgan
#68. 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
#69. The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.
Bernard Bailyn
#70. At school, myself and some pals, all football-daft, divided up the old English First Division and wrote off to half a dozen clubs each asking for a trial.
Drew Busby
#71. Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.
C.S. Lewis
#72. When I was 12 years old, I got interested in learning English.
Jack Ma
#73. 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
#74. I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien's legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.
Samantha Shannon
#75. What good is ye world when ye canst not livest hither.
K. Hari Kumar
#76. What's chumming?" I asked, wondering if it was some old English nautical term for making friends.
Raleigh Blake
#77. My favorite pudding is good old English apple pie.
Jeremy Bulloch
#78. I grew up on a council estate in Luton, and as a child, I was very much into the brass-band tradition. I was basically a Salvation Army boy. My English granddad bought me a cornet when I was five years old.
Colin Salmon
#79. When I began my career as a flight attendant, I was a 21-year-old with a B.A. in English and stars in her eyes. I wanted to see every city in the world. I wanted to have adventures that, I hoped, would fuel a writing career some day.
Ann Hood
#81. Most of us would be upset if we were accused of being "silly." But the word "silly" comes from the old English word "selig," and its literal definition is "to be blessed, happy, healthy and prosperous."
Zig Ziglar
#82. Pelapi. It is an old word. There is no single word like it in English. It means 'librarian,' but also 'apprentice,' or perhaps 'student.
Scott Hawkins
#83. 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
#84. The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament.
Aleister Crowley
#85. Hocus was an old cunning attorney. The words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as "Hocus-pocus." - John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, 1874. see Charles Macklin.
John Arbuthnot
#86. About GreenHollyWood who is this character?? My English teacher a fat guy about 30 or 35 years old with Glasses and short Hair.
Deyth Banger
#87. I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on thesimple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.
Bernadette Devlin
#88. Our word "lord" comes from the Old English hlaford, or "loafward," he who guarded the bread supply - and was expected to share it.
Ronald Wright
#89. When I first started studying Greek, one of my absolute favorite parts was realizing that so many English words had these old, secret roots. Learning Greek was like being given a super-power: linguistic x-ray vision.
Madeline Miller
#90. George Bernard Shaw writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become an accountant.
John Osborne
#91. The old culture had come out of poverty, out of English customs.
Charlie Munger
#92. The word "landmark" is from the old English "landmearc", meaning 'an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one's course.
Robert Macfarlane
#93. You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer
Edward Thomas
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