My dad is an ob-gyn - he's retired now - and he wanted to come to the States to make a better life, for opportunity. My mom said that, on the plane ride here, I did not want to speak a word of English - I spoke Tagalog. And then, after the first day ...
Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spok...
Caravaggio: You're in love with him, aren't you? Your poor patient. You think he's a saint because of the way he looks? I don't think he is. Hana: I'm not in love with him. I'm in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.
Katharine Clifton: I'm impressed you can sew. Almásy: Good. Katharine Clifton: You sew very badly. Almásy: Well, you don't sew at all. Katharine Clifton: A woman should never learn to sew, and if she can she shouldn't admit to it.
Katharine Clifton: D'you not come in? Almásy: No. I should go home. Katharine Clifton: Will you please come in? Almásy: Mrs. Clifton... Katharine Clifton: [scowls] Don't. Almásy: I believe you still have my book.
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets —no, they're little gifts, conta...
My dad was an English professor.
English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet...
Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and writ...
Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging a...
You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her...
Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unreme...
A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a cons...
Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.
He then explained his new philosophy, which followed the devastating discovery that Love and Friendship were the veriest illusions. He explained that people married because their sexual appetite had to be satisfied and there must be somebody to manag...
Princess, princess, youngest daughter, Open up and let me in! Or else your promise by the water Isn’t worth a rusty pin. Keep your promise, royal daughter, Open up and let me in!
He sat down and collected his thoughts. They were quite easy to collect, because there weren't very many of them, and they all concerned the same subject--what a burden his life was.
The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8
So, what are you going to do about it?” "Watch this!" "Oh, that’s just freaking great. ‘Watch this!’ The two most dangerous words in the English language. I’m getting out of here before lightning strikes.
