Mary Elizabeth: Charlie, Charlie, what do you think about high school? Charlie: High school? Bullshit. The cafeteria is called the Nutrition Center; people wear their letter jackets even when it's 98 degrees out. And why do they give out letter jacke...
Gareth Peirce: It's not the stairs that are killing your father. Gerry Conlon: Aye, what is it then? Gareth Peirce: It's your lack of faith. Gerry Conlon: Lack of faith? Faith in what? Gareth Peirce: In yourself. Gerry Conlon: No. I have faith in mys...
Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)
He shook his head,'Fuck, you say such fucking weird things.' 'Is that still your favourite word?' asked Isola interestedly, 'I like "verisimilitude". Tolkein said the most beautiful English phrase is "cellar door",
When just a kid, moved back to Canada and looking for a taste of England, I’d picked up a book of my Gram’s, a dog-eared romance from the ’sixties about English hospital ‘sisters’ trying to get it on with the doctors, and thought it very sh...
The bridge between the words glamour and grammar is magic. According to the OED, glamour evolved through an ancient association between learning and enchantment.
Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.
In this world . . . It's when: The French are chefs The British are police The Germans are engineers The Swiss are bankers And the Italians are lovers It's when: The English are chefs The Germans are police The French are engineers The Swiss are love...
Hey, any idea why Australians speak something that sounds deceptively like English but isn’t? I mean, I’m trying to figure out why I can’t seem to converse with another human being who speaks the same language as I do.
Which one is right? Which one is wrong? When you feel you could answer that type of questions, you trapped on your own perception. -Back cover, Andante Part 1, English modified-
Personally, I think so-called "common language" is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow" just isn't.
That’s different. The French know that the English are superior to them and they’re appropriate about it. The Eastern Europeans on the other hand have no sense of place. All that communism has them thinking that everyone really is of the same cla...
There's a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that's, for the last like 10, 15 years, that's all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look int...
In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, bec...
The popular image [in England] of Bonaparte as a blood-stained tyrant and bandit was admittedly exaggerated, but instinct told even the most radical among the English that if liberty, equality, and justice were ever to come to their shores, it certai...
But Kate, dost thou understand thus much English? Canst thou love me?" Catherine: "I cannot tell." Henry: "Can any of your neighbours tell, Kate? I'll ask them.
The word 'Indonesia' was first manufactured in 1850 in the form 'Indu-nesians' by the English traveler and social observer George Samuel Windsor Earl. He was searching for an ethnographic term to describe 'that branch of the Polynesian race inhabitin...
English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a differ...
He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought--some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the face of almost certain rain.
You shine brighter than the sun" "But even the sun goes away every night" "But it is hte sun's absence that makes us feel its power. We know the loss, the beauty and the life that the moon can't replace. That is why we hang on to each day we are give...
And what is I was only supposed to burn for a certain amount of time?" I whispered. "What if I was only meant to shine for a while?" "Then you truly don't know what stars are meant to do." I looked at him in wonder. "They are meant to give us hope in...
