Top 100 Quotes About Being English
#1. For me, even just being English was a whole sort of experience in as much as I'm Australian.
Radha Mitchell
#2. I think it's part of being English, particularly if you are middle-class - you're always looking to be reminded that you are no good and you are always actually embarrassed about being successful.
Chris Martin
#3. Oh, Syd wants me. She's just being English...We totally told her country to go fuck themselves, don't tell me the fact we're American isn't the reason she's blowing me off."
"Dan, I seriously doubt the Declaration of Independence has anything to do with her disinterest in you.
T. Gephart
#4. I don't feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don't feel either. And, in another way, of course, I'm both.
Martin McDonagh
#5. I felt very special in Paris, more special than I felt in London. I love London for different reasons. I've always been close to London, being English. But somehow, there's something special about living as an Englishwoman in Paris.
Charlotte Rampling
#6. He was the least scary adult present, besides being English and therefore fascinating.
Jeanne Birdsall
#7. According to them, everyone wants to be English. Being English is the best thing in the world. (Far behind, the second best thing is being God himself.)
Angela Kiss
#8. The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
Tom Stoppard
#9. Being English, I always laugh at anything to do with the lavatory or bottoms.
Elizabeth Hurley
#10. There's just something about being English. When you travel the world you feel more grateful.
Dizzee Rascal
#11. I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.
Robert Wilson
#12. No. I am not a royalist. Not at all. I am definitely a republican in the British sense of the word. I just don't see the use of the monarchy though I'm fierce patriot. I'm proud proud proud of being English, but I think the monarchy symbolizes a lot of what was wrong with the country.
Daniel Radcliffe
#13. To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
Leslie Fiedler
#14. When I couldn't speak English, I loved silent films circa 1914-1929, Abel Gance being my favorite director.
Kola Boof
#15. The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe.
Terry Pratchett
#16. It's okay to be proud of your good English. But don't be proud of being poor at your Mother tongue. Only the scum of the earth do that.
Manasa Rao
#17. I'll buy it right now, Jack," said an English voice, somehow familiar, "if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is.
Neal Stephenson
#18. Being blonde means people decide on sight that you are much prettier and nicer than you really are, just as Americans automatically add 10 points to someone's IQ when they hear an English accent. Fact.
Rachel Johnson
#19. It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name - corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals.
Mark Kurlansky
#20. I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.
S.I. Hayakawa
#21. I believe in some parts of Nietzsche,
I prefer to read him in sections;
In my heart of hearts I suspect him
of being the one modern christian;
Take notice I never have read him
except in English selections.
Ezra Pound
#22. Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.
Gilbert Murray
#23. 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
#24. The craziest part of being on tour is being overseas and having crazed fans so far away from home. They don't speak English, but they still know the lyrics. That's a trip.
Tinashe
#25. Dieter, you're a brick!" I shouted. I couldn't help it. Dieter looked as pleased as punch. To him, being called a brick by an English native was probably more precious than a knighthood.
Alan Bradley
#26. The first time I was in Stockholm, everybody was real cordial, but I started having these nightmares that I was being watched by aliens, basically all the time. My theory on it was that it was really, really unnerving to be in a place where English isn't the first language.
Mikky Ekko
#27. My grandmother was an English teacher for a while. And she stressed to me the importance of reading, being able to articulate well.
Kevin Gates
#28. What I see as specially English is the charm - everyone is so polite. Being restrained is part of the charm. And I love the sense of humour - it takes me back to Australia. The English are great at making fun of themselves. They're so self-effacing.
Danielle De Niese
#29. We've got to turn this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A's and speaking proper English: that's criminal.
Spike Lee
#30. I ended up doing four or five plays in college and being an English major with my thesis in language acquisition, which I was planning to study in graduate school.
Carrie Coon
#31. When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.
J. Courtney Sullivan
#32. It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
Martin Amis
#33. (Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)
Tom Robbins
#34. I've realized is that every time you get something cool for your birthday or for Christmas, within a week it's being used against you. (We'll be taking this away until your English grade improves)
Jeff Kinney
#35. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
Virginia Woolf
#36. Stop your bitching, Nick. You should try being an immortal demon who's lived since the dawn of time having to sit through this crap when English is not my native tongue, and if you think you're fluent in it, buddy, I actually know what a gerund is.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#37. Sham marriages have been widespread; people have been allowed to settle in Britain without being able to speak English; and there have not been rules in place to stop migrants becoming a burden on the taxpayer. We are changing all of that.
Theresa May
#38. Apparently the Dutch now prided themselves on being better at queues than the English, which was absurd, because standing cheerfully in line was the English national sport.
Orson Scott Card
#39. Can you imagine being bilingual? Or even knowing anybody that was? I'm not even unilingual. Actually, I shouldn't say that. I don't give myself enough credit. I know enough English to, you know, get by. I can order in restaurants and stuff.
Brian Regan
#40. I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they've made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.
Gary Shteyngart
#41. There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia.
Michael Ignatieff
#42. I don't like being flattered. It doesn't suit my English sensibilities. Remember, we are the great country of understatement.
Martin Parr
#43. I never felt that although we were based in Germany, Puma was and should be considered as a German brand. So we restructured it in a way that positioned us as a global brand, with English being the corporate language, rather than us looking at it from a German perspective.
Jochen Zeitz
#44. Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, 'It was a perfect script for she and I,' inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, 'Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?'
Dick Cavett
#45. The time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world conquerors.
Henry Cabot Lodge
#46. I wouldn't say no to being in a film with Jude Law. I love English actors.
Catherine Deneuve
#47. The English are very fond of being entertained, and ... they regard the French and the American people as destined by Heaven to amuse them.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#48. 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
#49. There are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy.
Vikram Seth
#50. Ugh. You're being ... you."
"Was that in English?"
"This is all your fault."
"Nope. Definitely not English."
"You're being all hot and sexy, dammit," she said. She banged her head on his chest a few times. "And I can't seem to ... not notice said hotness and sexiness.
Jill Shalvis
#51. A being who can create a race of men devoid of real freedom and inevitably foredoomed to be sinners, and then punish them for being what he has made them, may be omnipotent and various other things, but he is not what the English language has always intended by the adjective holy.
John Stuart Mill
#52. It was a sweet view-sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.
Jane Austen
#53. In English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room, a page someone forgot to rip out of a calendar, the walking embodiment of jet lag.
Jean-Christophe Valtat
#54. I was a terrible reader as a kid. I mean terrible. Super slow and very unfocused. It took me forever to read a book, and I remember being well into high school and still needing my mom to sit down and read aloud to me so I could pass my English tests and such.
John Corey Whaley
#55. Talk English to me, Tommy.
Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole.
But the meanings are different
in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#56. I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all.
Claire-Louise Bennett
#57. We start off wearing frilly shirts and britches and being good guys and the heroes. And then as time goes on, every English actor ends up playing bad guys. That's what we do.
James Purefoy
#58. Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.
Jonathan Stroud
#59. 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
#60. Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.
David Guterson
#61. My wife is funny. And I dabble in it. So being funny is big around our house. But what's surprised me is my daughter can do an English accent. I don't know how she learned this.
Jerry Seinfeld
#62. My body froze and my heart raced, as I let rip with a breathless scream. It felt like I was being stabbed by hundreds of tiny ice daggers, as the filthy surge ran down my legs and flooded my boots. I clung to the ladder, shaking and shivering, all the while cursing the abominable English climate. I
Richard Harrison
#63. For years I had been aware of an important deficiency in the English language: a word to describe something a person loses that was never really hers.
Ellen Miller
#64. Micro-aggression - The plastic gun of racism; you can sneak this one through security most of the time because it is comprised of nonracist ways of being racist, nonsexist ways of being sexist, and the like. E.g., You're not like other BLANK people, or, You speak English very well.
T. Geronimo Johnson
#65. I will never know what it's like to have only one language in my head. I have the pleasure of being able to move back and forth between Spanish and English, and I incorporate both languages in my books.
Pat Mora
#66. She blinked at me, then realized I was panicking. Honestly, it was like admitting to murder before being interrogated.
"Ms. Davidson," she began, but I decided to trip her up, to throw her off the trail of blood I'd left like an injured animal.
"I don't speak English.
Darynda Jones
#67. Canada is the essence of not being. Not English, not American, it is the mathematic of not being. And a subtle flavour - we're more like celery as a flavour.
Mike Myers
#68. Stop being silly, her name is Reshidatu. It is a pity that our official language is English, and a greater pity that our three major languages is the WaZoBia.
S.A. David
#69. It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
Thom Gunn
#70. You don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be?
Ken Robinson
#71. London has this culture of the theatre that is so big, it was a like a dream - but I never had a thought to be able to play here because my English was not very good. So being given the opportunity to come work here was like a gift.
Elena Roger
#72. An English gentleman is someone who knows exactly when to stop being one.
Maya Rodale
#73. I go through life watching the english language being raped before me face, like miniver cheevy, i was born too late.
and like miniver cheevy i cough and call it fate and go on drinking.
Helene Hanff
#74. When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.
Aasif Mandvi
#75. In the late 1970s, business cards were just being reintroduced in China. I received one which stated, in English: The responsible person of the department concerned. KAREL KOVANDA Brussels
Anonymous
#76. There is something remarkably and peculiarly English about the passion for sitting on damp seats watching open-air drama only the English have mastered the art of being truly uncomfortable while facing up to culture.
Sheridan Morley
#77. Hey, any idea why Australians speak something that sounds deceptively like English but isn't? I mean, I'm trying to figure out why I can't seem to converse with another human being who speaks the same language as I do.
Elle Lothlorien
#78. The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.
Tony Hillerman
#79. 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
#80. Floyd Paterson? Boy, he's the complete opposite to me. He no way like me.They go down in history for just being athletes. I'm getting more praise and credit for doing what I'm doing now on this show than coming here and beating five of your English champions.
Muhammad Ali
#81. The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.
Cyril Connolly
#83. Knowing English is important, but for us Venezuelans I think it would also be important to know Portuguese . For that reason, we should evaluate the possibility of it being taught in our schools.
Hugo Chavez
#84. 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
#85. The English are worried about the Euro being brought in because of loss of national identity and rising prices. In Scotland, people are just worried in case they have to close Poundstretcher.
Frankie Boyle
#86. Separately, they called our English teacher to register their horror at their offspring being taught about witches, which apparently was an insult to both Islam and Christianity. The English teacher instructed us to white-out the word witches and write in weird sisters.
Bill Campbell
#87. Being drunk is the only situation when English people completely avoid health and safety rules.
Angela Kiss
#88. Being an English major prepares you for impersonating authority.
Garrison Keillor
#89. (The Francophile and radical John Stuart Mill had noted, not long after the Commune fell, in a letter to an English union leader, "an infirmity of the French mind" - that of "being led away by phrases, and treating abstractions as if they were realities which have a will and exert active power.")
Anonymous
#90. The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of dreams.
Siri Hustvedt
#91. Georgian England, to see those wonderful houses being built. And the clothes were interesting too, although I wouldn't want to wear a wig. It's also the most beautiful period of English landscape gardening. They had famous gardeners like Capability Brown.
Alan Titchmarsh
#92. Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who'd been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons.
Hunter S. Thompson
#93. There's a thing in the U.K., particularly in London, where it's kind of the idea of subculture and counterculture and the outside and the idea that it's great to be a freak, and the freak always wins. So I think English girls are a lot less scared of being the freak or looking like an idiot.
Edie Campbell
#94. The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.
Stephen Ambrose
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English.
James F. Cooper
#98. Then, as I stood in that English garden on the soft early summer night, I felt a surge of pure well-being engulf my whole body. I felt a shivering current of happiness and benevolence flow through me.
William Boyd
#99. The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.
Lauren Willig
#100. I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.
J.G. Ballard
