English Quotes

“You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party.”

“The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.”

“What I want to tell you is, I think the English patient is not English.”

“The English! They expect you to fight for them but won’t talk to you. Singh. And the ambiguities.”

“It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English – up to fifty words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.”

“I have not disobeyed my sovereign. I truly believe no man in England is safer than myself.”

″‘We live in America,’ he said. ‘Everyone who speaks English understands you. How they interpret you is something else.‘”

“I was sitting across from an Englishman, one of those smart people who know how to run things [...] but who now, since the demise of the empire, have nothing to do; they look so sad, sitting on the rubbish heap of history.”

″‘You are wearing handmade loafers, a silk shirt, and three gold signet rings. Your English has a tinge of Oxford about it, and your nails have the soft sheen of the recently manicured. You are not a waiter. You are our contact Nguyen Xuan, and you have adopted this pathetic disguise to discreetly check for weaponry’”

“Why did the English language have so few words for green? Every leaf and every tree had its own shade of green. Another example of how far Nature was still ahead of humans. ”

“English is a word problem: if mail+box=mailbox: Does lipstick-stick=lip.”

“With that, Miyax became Julie. She was given a cot near the door in Martha’s little house and was soon walking to school in the darkness. She liked to learn the printed English words in books, and so a month passed rather happily.”

″ ‘Oh, Murder! What was that, Papa!’ ‘My child, it was a Motor-Car, A Most Ingenious Toy! Designed to Captivate and Charm Much rather than to rouse Alarm In any English Boy.’ ”

“Theresa sells her Highgate house and moves to the picture-perfect town of Bellevue-sur-Mer, just outside Nice.”

“That is not English, Will. And when we speak to one another, you and I, we do not use English. We use the Old Speech. We were born with it in our tongues. You think you are speaking English now, because your common sense tells you it is the only language you understand, but if your family were to hear you they would hear only gibberish. The same with that book.”

“If there is anyone here this afternoon whom I have convinced that books are meant to be enjoyed, that English is nothing to do with duty, that it has nothing to do with school- with exercises and homework and ticks and crosses- then I am a happy man.”

“English is what matters. ENGLISH IS LIFE.”

″ ‘What,’ cried I, ‘were you in the English army?’ ‘That was I,’ said Alan. ‘But I deserted to the right side at Prestonpans–and that’s some comfort.’ I could scarcely share this view: holding desertion under arms for an unpardonable fault in honour. But for all I was so young, I was wiser than say my thought. ‘Dear, dear,’ says I, ‘the punishment is death.’ ”

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

“Nanny is my nurse She wears tissue paper in her dress and you can hear it She is English and has 8 hairpins made out of bones She says that’s all she needs in this life for Lords sake”

“The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be human.”

“our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get—six of the seven most common verbs in English—may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English.”

“No longer an American, Benedict Arnold was never accepted as an Englishman, either.”