English Usage Quotes

#1. I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.

Geraldine Brooks

#2. Conventional English usage, including the generic use of masculine-gender words, often obscures the actions, the contributions, and sometimes the very presence of women. Turning our backs on that insight is an option, of course, but it is an option like teaching children that the world is flat.

Casey Miller

#3. English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

E.B. White

#4. Among people who might be described as having at least a passing regard for the English language, there are few instances of usage that evoke a desire to mutilate more than the perceived misuse of literally.

Ammon Shea

#5. Hello, Spring Roll. I'm your daddy and I've been waiting to meet you for a long time. I love you so much.

Sylvain Reynard

#6. To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

Jack Lynch

#7. Rumors are the children of truth.

Danny M. Cohen

#8. It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language.

A.E. Van Vogt

#9. Sure, I've listed myself as Cuban-American. That's my heritage and my background.

Ted Cruz

#10. Do you have any idea of the pain [the animals have] suffered at human hands?

Megan Shepherd

#11. 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

#12. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

C.S. Lewis

#13. In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: "the real world". In Dutch - and I am afraid not in Dutch alone - its usage is almost always a symptom of a violent anti-intellectualism.

Edsger Dijkstra

#14. It is contrary to our natural logic that God would choose to use the foolish and the weak to show himself to be wise. We have difficulty seeing how God is praised through our insufficiencies

Gloria Furman

#15. I generally don't care what we watch because we can be like this, snuggled together in his room, which is my favorite thing in the world to do.

Jolene Perry

#16. Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

Bill Bryson

#17. Mark Twain fell in love with his wife after he saw her picture painted on an ivory miniature the size of a fingernail.

Jenny Offill

#18. One of the most important things for me in terms of my working method is doubt. I get very insecure about my ideas. And I don't say 'insecure' in kind of a paranoid way. I mean just: 'Are they good enough?' 'Is this the right thing to do?' I really beat myself up over that.

Bill Viola

#19. BILL: I have not forsook my responsibilities!-
BARBARA: It's "forsaken," big shot!
BILL: Actually, "forsook" is also an acceptable usage!-
BARBARA: Oh, "forsook" you and the horse you rose in on!

Tracy Letts

#20. I believe [ ... ] that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

Neil Gaiman

#21. And you can't do anything without God. God hates us, you know. That's why so many believe we have to love Him so much. What feeble goddamned pussies we are.

Larry Kramer

#22. I gotta say, I was really feeling the robe, but there's something about a girl in cartoon pajamas that does it for me.

Stacey O'Neale

#23. I've got a stag weekend coming up and I've said I'm not doing anything more than a few drinks. I won't have it. I'll go home and watch Antiques Roadshow.

Martin Freeman

#24. He was the darkest of voices inside her head, the Night-kind King, and when he turned his gift of persuasion onto her, she wanted to take her soul out of her body and hand it to him.

Thea Harrison