Parents English Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Even though I couldn't speak English, there were many times that my black-American parents could read my mind and I could read theirs.

Kola Boof

#3. Both my parents are English and I was born in West Africa, and I moved around as a kid, lived in Bristol, lived in Buckinghamshire and Surrey as a kid, and then moved when I was 16.

Hugo Weaving

#4. My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur.

Paul Nurse

#5. My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English.

Chris Abani

#6. My parents grew up in poor families where little English was spoken, they both went to college and became teachers. They believed that anything was possible with hard work, and they particularly stressed the importance of education. They instilled that same belief in my sister and me.

Samuel Alito

#7. It has always been my conviction that Indian parents who train their children to think and talk in English from their infancy betray their children and their country. They

Mahatma Gandhi

#8. In this country, it doesn't make any difference where you were born. It doesn't make any difference who your parents were. It doesn't make any difference if, like me, you couldn't even speak English until you were in your twenties.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#9. It's a challenge getting rid of an accent by yourself. I have parents that have such thick accents. They are like, "She sounds fine." They didn't know. To them, I spoke perfect English because their accents were so heavy. I don't even want to know what I sounded like. I don't want to know!

Odeya Rush

#10. I was brought up in a way that when you're at a dinner party, you don't grab a chip unless it's been offered to everyone else. It's the manners of being brought up by English parents.

Hugh Jackman

#11. Our parents taught us to love God, love our family and love our country. Their own grandparents were immigrants. Their first language may not have been English, but the hopes and dreams they had for their children were purely American.

Martin O'Malley

#12. My parents are very funny when they have to deal with anything racy or off-color. They usually pretend they don't speak English.

Margaret Cho

#13. I'm completely English, but I grew up in Paris and went to school here. My parents moved when I was five.

Jemima West

#14. I was born here in the States. I moved to Portugal when I was five. And then my parents put me in an English school.

Daniela Ruah

#15. I studied Shakespeare all through high school. Both of my parents teach English and history, so it has always been around my experience as a young man.

Xavier Samuel

#16. American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.

Oscar Wilde

#17. I was born in America but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe. Many people in my neighborhood hardly bothered to learn English.

Christopher Walken

#18. My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.

Lorraine Bracco

#19. My mom and my dad wanted my brother and I to have a better life, you know, better education, better jobs. It was probably harder, much, much harder, for my parents. When you're a kid, you can learn a language much more easily; I learned English in less than a year.

Mila Kunis

#20. I have quite a few different Bibles. Having rejected my parents' religion, I still think the King James Bible is the most important work of literature in English. None of us can help being influenced by it.

Ken Follett

#21. My parents are both English. My dad is a plastic surgeon - his name's Norman Waterhouse, but we call him Normy. And my mom's a nurse, which is how they met - in a hospital, over decaying bone.

Suki Waterhouse

#22. I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.

Antonya Nelson

#23. Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It's a rhythm thing - people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.

Christopher Walken

#24. My parents were both Spanish-speakers and they used to speak to me and my siblings in Spanish and we'd answer them in English.

America Ferrera

#25. An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.

Sonia Sotomayor

#26. My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I've passed it on to my children.

Corin Tucker

#27. You know, even growing up going to school, I had teachers that were against bilingual teaching. I never understood that. My parents always had me speak Spanish first knowing I was going to speak English in school.

Emily Rios

#28. I was raised to be kind. My parents were underdogs. Immigrant Jews. I spoke with an accent. I didn't speak English even - I spoke French and Yiddish mostly. I was picked on.

Saul Rubinek

#29. I was always aware of what the language I was using meant in terms of my bond with my parents - how it defined the lines of affection between us. When I spoke English, I felt I wasn't completely their child any more but the child of another language.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#30. Over 90 percent of parents in Puerto Rico want their children to be totally fluent in English.

Luis Fortuno

#31. MasterChef Junior for me was about working closely with these kids and getting them to reeducate their parents to understand that food is as important educationally as Math and English and it's important that we don't take it for granted.

Gordon Ramsay

#32. You'll hear people say it's racist to test. Folks, it's racist not to test. Because guess who gets shuffled through the system oftentimes? Children whose parents don't speak English as a first language, inner-city kids. It's so much easier to quit on somebody than to remediate.

George W. Bush

#33. A woman who loses a husband is called a widow, a man who loses his wife is called a widower, and a child who loses his/her parents is called an orphan, but there is no word in the English language for a parent who loses a child (Jay Neugeboren).

David Asay

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

Pat Conroy

#35. It hapens very often that parents think they are worred about the progress a boy is making. they do not realise that all boys are numskulls with o branes which is not surprising when you look at the parents really the whole thing goes on and on and there is no stoping it it is a vicious circle.

Geoffrey Willans

#36. I grew up with parents who were English professors at Wichita State University, and we were more liberal-minded as a family than most of the people I hung out with in Wichita. During summers, we went off to Telluride, Colorado, where I've returned every summer since I was born.

Antonya Nelson

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

Christopher Castellani

#38. In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.

Jodi Picoult

#39. The inner me was always under attack by authority, by the way my parents wanted me to be brought up, by these English schools I went to. So I've always felt this kind of anti-authoritarian strain in me, pushing to express itself despite the obstacles.

Edward Said

#40. I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.

Daniel Day-Lewis

#41. An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.

Maeve Binchy

#42. Nothing could convince Aunt Nelly to let Vlad stay home for the duration of the school year, which just goes to prove that parents and guardians don't care if they're sending you to face bloodthirsty monsters, so long as you get a B in English.

Heather Brewer

#43. I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.

John Fowles

#44. Sign language is my first language. English and Spanish are my second languages. I learned Spanish from my grandparents, sign language from my parents, and English from television.

Jack Jason

#45. My parents were teetotalers and my grandparents were - it's all the way back. It's New English puritanical tradition.

Penn Jillette

#46. I was born in England - though both of my parents are American - and there's something about the 'Muppets' where they have this combination of English and American humor.

Nicholas Stoller