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 Spa...
Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had...
It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it's just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students' repertoire rather than teaching them out of what's t...
I was born abroad, but my parents were both English. Still, those few years of separation, and then coming back to England as an outsider, did give me an ability to see the country in a slightly detached way. I suppose I was made aware of what Englis...
Those English always say, "Look before thou leap". But, as is customary with the English, that is looking the wrong way. I say, Ranga, to look before thou look. Then, when thou actually looks before thou leaps, thou will have already done the leaping...
Hana: [reads Almásy's note on the firecracker] "Betrayals in war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace. New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything. For the heart is an organ of fire." For the heart is an organ of fire.I...
Almásy: There is no God... but I hope someone looks after you. Madox: Just in case you're interested, it's called the suprasternal notch. Come and visit us in Dorset when all this nonsense is over. [Heads away but turns back] Madox: You'll never com...
Almásy: [being carried up the stairs] There was a Prince, who was dying, and he was carried up the tower at Pisa so he could die with a view of the Tuscan Hills. Am I that Prince? Hana: [laughs] Because you're leaning? No, you're just on an angle. Y...
English Teacher: [speaking very slowly] In... what... way... does the author's use of the prison [takes chalk and draws prison bars through the word 'prison' on blackboard] English Teacher: symbolize the protagonist's struggle, and how does this rela...
Gandhi: We must defy the British... Not with violence that will inflame their will but with a firmness that will open their eyes. English factories make the cloth that makes our poverty. All those who wish to make the English see bring me the cloth f...
Joe (Cantonese)/Jeffrey (English): I think you and I could be friends. Lee: If I put my gun down, right? That's your condition? Joe (Cantonese)/Jeffrey (English): Can you do it? (No response) At least we can be temporary friends. We have a common ene...
French Soldier: You don't frighten us, English pig dogs. Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called "Arthur King," you and all your silly English K-nig-hts.
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. Afte...
I'm not very good at standard English.
English music is white - it evades everything.
Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man's work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in the poems of William Blake. The Romantic movement...
There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and obscurities...more worthy to express the invariable relations of all natural things [than mathematics]. [It interprets] all phenomena by the same language, as if to ...
There is no need to worry about whether you are capable of manifesting what you want. The truth is, the universe already is providing you exactly what you have asked.
Every time a poet is about to write, every time the open their mouth to say something, they express their inner world and tell of their own feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and opinions, unless they are deliberately pursuing fantasies which contrast with...
Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a child then, so I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I fir...
It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like liste...
