English Quotations | Page 3

I love Jet Li, but he looks very Chinese, and his English is Chinese-accented. He wouldn't have been the right guy to play a Japanese-American.

My children were educated in what were then Chinese schools, and they learned English as a subject. But they made up when they went to English-language universities. So they didn't lose out. They had a basic set of traditional Confucian values. Not my grandchildren.

Middle English is an exciting field - almost uncharted, I begin to think, because as soon as one turns detailed personal attention on to any little corner of it, the received notions and ideas seem to crumple up and fall to pieces - as far as language goes, at any rate.

I had the impression from reading English literature that British women were great beauties, and I only had seen Julie Christie, and she was gorgeous and sexy. I don't know whether it was just my taste, but when I got to London, I went two years without seeing a truly attractive woman. A lot of near misses.

I don't hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don't read a lot of literature and not care about language.

It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.

I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.

I thought that strange syntax was the language of story books. I didn't realize those were poor translations... English from Edwardian times.

Kids deserve arts, and it's just as important as science, math, history, English or athletics.

In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.

I'm reasonably easygoing. Messing up my lines or making a fool of myself is where you find my fears. Like a lot of English people, I'm prey to embarrassment - the dread that everyone's sort of sniggering at you, that you're going to look like an idiot. I think that sort of halts us all.

I wanted to act when I was young. When I was 12, I asked the head of English at my school, 'Can I audition?' and he said, 'What would we want you for?' And I remember going, 'Oh yeah. Why would they want me?'

I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.

I think English punk died in '79 or '80. Maybe '82 at the latest. As far as American punk goes, it wasn't the same as English punk. It wasn't a working-class movement that was protesting the conditions under which this class had to work. I don't think American punk ever died.

Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.

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.

My style of singing has always been referred to 'soul' singing when it fact it's more influenced by English R&B Blues Shouting. I'm closer to Led Zeppelin as a vocalist than to Ella Fitzgerald. It was torture dealing with major labels.

I will not undertake to offer an opinion on the capacity of Hindustan to produce cotton. The region is large, and the soil and climate various, the population great and wages low; but I must be permitted to doubt the success of the experiment of driving us out of the market, though backed and patronized by English capital and energy.

I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.

My favorite subject was English or creative writing. We did poems and making a magazine, and I did one on celebrities. I called it 'Celebrity Life Magazine.' I interviewed my good friend Kaley Cuoco.

To be honest, the core reason why I became an actor was that I didn't want to go to school. That's where it started. I hated opening my history books and my English books, but then, of course, you grow older. I went to film school in New York, and that's when you really realize that you have to grow up now. It's not child's play anymore.

All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.

I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

Good shoes are important. I wear English brogues in a wide fitting. They last me years.

Casseroles don't have to be about canned ingredients and vegetables you normally wouldn't even think of eating alone, much less stuck in between layers of sauce and breadcrumbs. They can vary from everyone's favorite all-time casserole, macaroni and cheese, to the ultimate English casserole, Shepherd's Pie.

In about 9th grade, an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school, so I did on a whim. I got accepted. Then I got accepted at the Julliard School, and by then, I was serious about it.

Comparing and contrasting is a valuable human skill - and not just during high school English exams. Our ability to rank-order things is invaluable in making choices and setting priorities.

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.

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.

I have been learning English on the road since I started when I was 15, so it is a slow process but making some progress. Now I think I am much more comfortable with my English. However, it is difficult, still, when I speak about something that is not tennis.

Americans aren't good at accents, but the English are because their accents change. You go five or six blocks and the accent is different, so they are used to hearing different pitches. In America, you gotta travel maybe 10 states before you can really hear a difference.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.

The English don't like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It's alright if they come from an 'intellectual,', but from a pop star you're getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn't rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you're in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn't it?

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

There is a certain ancient civility about tailors that is welcome - especially in modern London, which is now very much an international city, not an English city. They're still a little vessel of Englishness in what is otherwise a pretty rambunctious place.

The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.

English food writer Elizabeth David, cook and author Richard Olney and the owner of Domaine Tempier Lulu Peyraud have all really inspired the way I think about food.

I learned English kind of late. I remember when I got my first opportunity to work in America, I didn't speak a lot of English, so I only really knew my lines for the movie I was doing.

I think in the past, around the time that method acting became so prevalent, it used to be that American actors were thought to be the kind that would work more from the inside out, and that the English actors worked more from the outside in.

When you get into the third or fourth generation of Latino immigrants to the United States, you see the kids speaking more English than Spanish, and it's important that we don't lose our identity, our language.

In high school, I once sang 'Let's Get It On' and 'Brown Sugar' with a band that included my English teacher and my math teacher.

My brother and I have matching tattoos on our arms. It says, 'Humility is strength,' in Portuguese and Italian, because my genius brother taught English in both Italy and Brazil.

If you walk through Knightsbridge on any bland day of the week you won't hear an English accent. You'll hear every accent under the sun apart from the British accent.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

People sort of accuse Tolkien of not being good with female characters, and I think that Eowyn actually proves that to be wrong to some degree. Eowyn is actually a strong female character, and she's a surprisingly modern character, considering who Tolkien actually was sort of a stuffy English professor in the 1930s and '40s.

As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

The other side said (there are) 799 federal and state laws mandating the use of English. ... We would say those kinds of laws are not at issue here. I think that English is the official language of this country in a practical sense already. And I think that most people who come here both learn English and want to learn English.

The pleasures of afternoon tea run like a trickle of honey through English literature from Rupert Brooke's wistful lines on the Old Vicarage at Grantchester to Miss Marple, calmly dissecting a case over tea cakes at a seaside hotel.

We spoke French at home and I didn't know any English until I went to school. My mother was French and met my father when he visited France as a student on a teaching placement.

When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't speak French. But suddenly everyone could speak English because he was so cute.

What has changed is the American guys trying to learn Spanish. In the dugout, when I hear the Latin guys trying to speak English and the Americans trying to speak Spanish, it's funny.

What's invaluable about Bernie is that he has gotten a number of us eggheads together and has translated what is scientific gobbledygook into English so that our neighbors and friends can understand it,

We're going to look at how was the data transferred. How did it originally get into system in English units? How was it transferred? When we were doing navigation and Doppler (distance and speed) checks, how come we didn't find it?

With my parents, it's always in Slovak. With my siblings, it's English unless there is something that needs to be said that shouldn't be said, then we'll throw in a different language.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

We know English is good. They have good skill, good line play. It will be a challenge for us.

Wales' economy is growing faster than the English or the UK average. Over the rest of the year we expect growth will remain strong, although getting slightly weaker as the year progresses.

We accepted a higher proportion of English-learner students than any other state in the country, ... Our exclusion rate of English learners was 12%, while Texas' exclusion rate was 37.5% and New York's was 29%.

Wayne brings with him a wealth of experience and a fine reputation and I am confident that he will make a powerful contribution to English National Ballet and to the British dance world.

Wealth is so much the greatest good that Fortune has to bestow that in the Latin and English languages it has usurped her name.

We're about to get this done. We're in discussions with English Turn. We can't play the TPC in April. It's just too much work.

We're about to get this done, ... We're in discussions with English Turn. We can't play the TPC in April. It's just too much work.

We have plenty of cover on the wing. Ideally, I would like a three-quarter but, until he becomes available, I will bide my time. There are not many English players available.

When I turned 11, we had to leave East Germany overnight because of the political orientation of my father. Now I was going to school in West Germany, which was American-occupied at that time. There in school, all children were required to learn English and not Russian. To learn Russian had been difficult, but English was impossible for me.

The fact of the matter is that fewer people in Tokyo are able to do business in English than in many other big Asian cities, like Shanghai, Seoul or Bangkok.

The problem with the English Patient is that to enjoy it, you have to be either English or patient.

When I'm in town on Sundays, I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town.

We set out to be the No. 1 team in the world and the only time you can say that is when you have the World Cup sitting here with you, ... I hope it kicks on to a really golden era for English rugby.

We live in America, anyone that lives here should be able to understand 6th grade English or read at a 5th grade level. What is the difference what language the test is in? It's the same test. As it is students that speak perfect English and can read are failing. What do we do for them?

There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose.

When you're 11, walking home from school through this strange little English landscape, running these weird, wonderful things through your head ... well, now this is one of those 'I've never told anybody this before' things,

When I began my career as a flight attendant, I was a 21-year-old with a B.A. in English and stars in her eyes. I wanted to see every city in the world. I wanted to have adventures that, I hoped, would fuel a writing career some day.

The principal of PS 58 has been reassigned pending an investigation into a possible breach of the English Language Arts exam at the school. If the investigation finds the test was compromised, the results will be invalidated by the state Education Department.

MAGDALENE, n. An inhabitant of Magdala. Popularly, a woman found out. This definition of the word has the authority of ignorance, Mary of Magdala being another person than the penitent woman mentioned by St. Luke. It has also the official sanction of the governments of Great Britain and the United States. In England the word is pronounced Maudlin, whence maudlin, adjective, unpleasantly sentimental. With their Maudlin for Magdalene, and their Bedlam for Bethlehem, the English may justly boast themselves the greatest of revisers.

Let's see which English striker can score 21 Premiership goals this season,

Lots of soap operas, ... Both English and Irish. It sounds cheesy but we also ate a lot of potatoes while I was staying with them. We had stews and breads too.

Los Angeles is Los Angeles, and it's very easy for someone to come here not knowing English and be able to get a toehold on American society.

Less is more, and Moore is a bore"" was what one heard from English art students.

Learning English is the most difficult part, and I hope I can do it because I really want to become a citizen. I?m happy for my friends and I hope I can do it, too.

She's really tiny, but she's really cute. She reminded me of the first time I met Natalia a few years ago. She didn't speak English so well at the beginning, either.

Olivier was not catastrophic against the English but he was responsible for three of the penalties the referee awarded against us. When he gets too wound up it's a bad time so it's time for a look at the (others).

She couldn't speak English very well. You would think it was a big communication barrier, but it wasn't. We could understand each other.

She felt she wasn't ready. She wanted to work on her English a little more.

Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch's career as a journalist, so we've kind of kept in touch over the years.

Mr. Idris Elba is amazing! He happens to be British, but what's funny about him is that when he's speaking in his American dialect, he looks like he's a brother from the 'hood. But as soon as he brings out that English thing, I'm like, 'Woo! You look like you're from London. Oh my God!' It's like everything on him changes. He's so cool!

Mr. President, that whimsical English professor, Dr. Parkinson, should formulate another Parkinson's law relating to the public debt since it so closely parallels his law on bureaucratic growth. Just as spending will always reach and overtake revenues so the public debt will constantly pierce the ceiling and finally go into orbit.

May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. English Proverb

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.

My first roommate was from Hong Kong and spoke perfect English. He also spoke Mandarin and Cantonese but wanted to learn business and legal terms, ... My second roommate was from Northern Ireland. He had taught English in Japan for two years but wanted to work in China.

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

Nelson is a great part of English folklore history, perhaps the best known of Britain's military heroes.

One out of four students that we have in the county schools speak another first language. It's helpful to have bilingual teachers to be able to communicate with parents. In some cases, the students may speak English but the parents may or may not speak English. And it's critical to communicate with the parents.

One of the things I've always liked about my husband is he's very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on, he decided to go into economics, so he's very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.

One of our best managers, her second language is English. We needed her to get better at English to be able to leave her alone in the restaurant. I heard somebody compliment her today on her English.

My experience of Chinese culture is indirect, through echoes. When I approach the cashier at my local Chinese supermarket, they switch to English before I've even said a word. They somehow know that I'm not quite Chinese enough.