the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags...
Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity...
He did recall that the summer after graduating from college before he joined the state police he had read Shakespeare. It was the pure language that stupefied him. He would be in a diner reading and his acquaintances were confident he was studying fo...
Some are born to greatness; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.' It is in this way that the librarian has become a censor of literature... books that distinctly commend what is wrong, that teach how to sin and how pleasant s...
There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does conc...
Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a fresh way of viewing the both literature and the world. From then on, I found I was impatient with boo...
Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, trowing...
English kings married their cousins and so their kids were as sharp as clubs.
I’ve realized is that every time you get something cool for your birthday or for Christmas, within a week it’s being used against you. (We'll be taking this away until your English grade improves)
Our children belong to God. We're only given them on loan from heaven. Sometimes God calls them home sooner tan we expected.
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...
Why did you tell her I'm your boyfriend? Why doesn't she know about your real one? - Timmy He's English! And Mom...Mom hates foreigners! - Cat
Australians are descended from a boatload of English convicts, right? So two hundred years in isolation at the bottom of the planet is plenty of time for the language to evolve into some sort of double-speak prison slang.
She would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English; it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.
If England had not used the services of privateers and pirates during its long struggle with Spain, there is some likelihood that people today in North America would be speaking Spanish rather than English.
The toaster (lacking real bread) would pretend to make two crispy slices of toast. Or, if the day seemed special in some way, it would toast an imaginary English muffin.
When I moved to London at age 16, tired of the shuffle around other people's houses and ready to live on my own, I met my English brother and sister, who instantly claimed me as family.
At the age of nine, I simultaneously fell in love with two Dutch sisters because they seemed so beautifully strange, and their clothes were mysterious and alluring - added to which, they could not speak a word of English. More than anything, I wanted...
In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge ...
As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.
In our generation, everybody told us that it's really important and it's nice to be able to speak a lot of languages. It's an art, too. It really impresses me, people who speak, like, seven languages. I admire them so much, so I began with English, a...
