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Category: english
Quotes of Category: english
TOP TAGS :poetrycivilityhesselecherytruth-and-liesmountainmockingjaybooks

  1. John le Carré _ Absolute Friends

    There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.
    book-quoteenglandenglishenglishmen

  2. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    Haydon was more than his model, he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of English calling which - for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive - had made sense of Guillam's life till now.
    book-quoteinspirationenglishenglishmen

  3. Pat Conroy

    The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding m
    readingliteratureteachersenglish

  4. John Fowles _ The Magus

    A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.
    book-quotepastlanguageengland

  5. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." {We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.}
    book-quotehumorpoliticsenglish

  6. E.M. Forster _ Howards End

    It was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air.
    book-quotetreeenglish

  7. Douglas Adams

    This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I'd gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It's very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here's the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There's a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn't look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it. Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There's nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn't do anything, and thought, What am I going to do? In the end I thought Nothing for it, I'll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn't because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. "Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice…" I mean, it doesn't really work
    humorenglish

  8. Jeffrey Eugenides _ Middlesex

    Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
    book-quotelearningfrenchenglish

  9. Jeffrey Eugenides _ Middlesex

    Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
    book-quoteemotionslanguagehatred

  10. Beryl Markham _ West with the Night

    "Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy.
    book-quotenationalityprideenglish

  11. Robert M. Pirsig _ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

    He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.
    book-quotelanguageinsightenglish

  12. Lewis Carroll _ Alice's Adventures in

    Speak English!" said the Eaglet. "I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!" And the Eaglet bend down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.
    book-quotespeechlanguageenglish
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