Apparently the complete works of Shakespeare packed quite a wallop. To think, my mother said I'd never find use for an English degree. Ha! I'd like to see her knock someone silly with an apron and a cookie press.
The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet havin...
And listen--tell your friend to try English Breakfast net time. It's a little more robust. Earl Grey is really more of a 'Sense and Sensibility' kind of tea. Cab driver to J.D. Jameson
Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'. "To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English," Peter said. "It's taken me most of today to get through a page.
Ah sortay jist laugh whin some cats say that racism's an English thing and we're aw Jock Tamson's bairn up here . . . it's likesay pure shite man, gadges talkin through their erses.
Democracy today, especially in the English-speaking world, is a political system that specialises in positioning inadequate, unqualified and dubious types in leadership positions.
'Hot Fuss' was all based on fantasy. The English influences, the makeup - they were what I imagined rock was. I'm a dreamer, you know? So I dug into that dream and made 'Hot Fuss.' But hearing people call us 'the best British band from America' made ...
I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.
'Ageism,' or whatever you want to call it, is a very English phenomenon. You don't get it too much in many other cultures. And no one says it about authors or poets or filmmakers. 'Oh, they're too old to make films or write books.'
English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frig...
Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in t...
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
But he would give the Spainish no satisfaction. When they offered him a drink, he smashed the glass and ate the shards, preferring his own English blood to their sweet wine. He died soon after.
Sitting here now today, I can forgive a lot of the English people because it only takes a hand full of bad people to do something stupid like that and it can make the whole country look bad.
Nicki Minaj thanked me on the first mixtape that she put out. She shouted me out, said thank you for allowing her to borrow my English accent sometimes. And honestly, a lot of people have told me that I've influenced them.
I was shy when I was a kid, I was very shy, but now I think I've improved a lot. I can speak OK with the media and with the people. My English is still bad but I feel a little bit better now than before.
I haven't taught since 2004, but I taught high school English for seven years, primarily at a place called Haddonfield Memorial, which is in a very well-to-do-community in Southern New Jersey.
Objections to verbification in English tend to be motivated by personal taste, not clarity. Verbed words are usually easily understood. When a word like 'friend' is declared not a verb, the problem isn't that it's confusing; it's that the protester f...
In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn't fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effec...
Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can d...
Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. econom...
