Stupido English Quotes

#1. To say that one goes on holiday is to speak the language of the working class, for whom the time off appears merry and playful; but to say one goes on vacation is to speak the language of the ruling class. Vacation comes from the same root as vacant and reflects what the owner sees when he looks around the floor - a vacancy where John 'should' 'be'. (I suspect that the owner probably thinks some negative thoughts about the Labor Unions and the 'damned Liberal' Government that force him to pay John even when John 'is vacant.')

I leave it as a puzzle for the reader: Do the Irish and English speak Working Class in this case because they have had several socialist governments, or have the had several socialist governments because they learned to speak the language of the Working Class? And: has the U.S., alone among industrial nations, never had a socialist government because it speaks the Ruling Class language, or does it speak the Ruling Class language because it has never had a socialist government? #Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

#2. Now, in all that he has done, Amos Tutuola is not sui generis. Is he ungrammatical? Yes. But James Joyce is more ungrammatical than Tutuola. Ezekiel Mphahlele has often said and written that African writers are doing violence to English. Violence? Has Joyce not done more violence to the English Language? Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is written in seven dialects, he tells us. It is acknowledged a classic. We accept it, forget that it has no "grammar", and go ahead to learn his "grammar" and what he has to tell us. Let Tutuola write "no grammar" and the hyenas and jackals whine and growl. Let Gabriel Okara write a "no grammar" Okolo. They are mum. Why? Education drives out of the mind superstition, daydreaming, building of castles in the air, cultivation of yarns, and replaces them with a rational practical mind, almost devoid of imagination. Some of these minds having failed to write imaginative stories, turn to that aristocratic type of criticism which magnifies trivialities beyond their real size. They fail to touch other virtues in a work because they do not have the imagination to perceive these mysteries. Art is arbitrary. Anybody can begin his own style. Having begun it arbitrarily, if he persists to produce in that particular mode, he can enlarge and elevate it to something permanent, to something other artists will come to learn and copy, to something the critics will catch up with and appreciate. #Quote by Taban Lo Liyong

#3. The Scots will do anything to beat the English or just to see them lose, but I've never bought into that really. #Quote by Gerard Butler

#4. This book aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. #Quote by William Strunk Jr.

#5. Living in the era of social media and dating apps, online dating is also a very popular dating method in England. It perfectly suits the English person's superpower: being the invisible man or woman. They also like to keep their distance, and the internet is perfect for that. Also complimenting someone is easier online than offline; you don't even have to say anything you just press a 'like' or a 'wink' button and that's it; perfectly suitable for romantically retarded people. #Quote by Angela Kiss

#6. Oceanic malaise. I never saw anyone reading anything more demanding than a comic book. I never heard any youth express an interest in science or art. No one even talked politics. It was all idleness, and whenever I asked someone a question, no matter how simple, no matter how well the person spoke English, there was always a long pause before I got a reply, and I found these Pacific pauses maddening. And there was giggling but no humor - no wit. It was just foolery. #Quote by Paul Theroux

#7. English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind. #Quote by Lytton Strachey

#8. Clothes, whips, reading material," the customs officer had summarized, in Spanish and English, to the young American. "Just the bare essentials!" Edward Bonshaw #Quote by John Irving

#9. I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English. #Quote by Daniel Alarcon

#10. The form of religion was always a trivial matter to me ... The pageantry of the Roman Church that first mothered and nurtured me touches me to this day. I love the Protestant prayers of the English Church. And I love the stern and knotty argument, the sermon with heads and sequences, of the New England Congregationalist. For this catholicity Catholics have upbraided me, churchmen rebuked me, and dissenters denied that I had any religion at all. #Quote by Mary Catherwood

#11. Woolf 's control over the production of her own work is a significant factor in her genesis as a writer. The Hogarth Press became an important and influential publishing house in the decades that followed. It was responsible, for example, for the first major works of Freud in English, beginning in 1922, and published significant works by key modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Woolf herself set the type for the Hogarth edition of
Eliot's The Waste Land (1923), which he read to them in June 1922, and which she found to have 'great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure' (D2 178). #Quote by Jane Goldman

#12. A dock worker from East Ham also spoke of freedom. "You'll never find the English going Communist" he said. "We don't like it. It's not true Communism, it dictatorial. We want to say what we think. I'm a republican myself and I don't like the Royal Family. They all look as if a good day's work would kill them". #Quote by Martha Gellhorn

#13. I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex. #Quote by Stephanie Perkins

#14. The Negro on saxophone blew out a language older than English and the glasses on the tables trembled #Quote by Melinda Haynes

#15. Fact.
Pisces is THE most wobbly sign of the Zodiac. #Quote by Mary English

#16. Her German language made my arteries harden-
I've no annuity for the play we blew.
I chartered an aluminum canoe,
I had her six times in the English Garden. #Quote by Robert Lowell

#17. And here, above the valley of Yarrow, Lord Culter and his brother and twenty men from Midculter in their wedding finery with, thank God, half armour beneath, waited to intercept the English army on its plundering march, with two shepherds, twelve arquebuses, some pikes, some marline twine, a leather pail of powder, shot, matches, some makeshift colours, and eight hundred rusted helmets from the Warden's storehouse at Talla. #Quote by Dorothy Dunnett

#18. ANDRÉ: . . . And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he'd just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he's going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, "Where are you from?" And I said, "New York." And he said, "Ah, New York, yes, that's a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?" And I said, "Oh, yes." And he said, "Why do you think they don't leave?" And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, "Oh, I don't think it's that way at all." He said, "I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they've built - they've built their own prison - and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have - having been lobotomized - the capacity to leave the prison they've made or even to see it as a prison." And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, "This is a pine tree." And he put it in my hand. And he said, "Escape before it's too late. #Quote by Wallace Shawn

#19. My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language. #Quote by James Thurber

#20. Americans are suckers for an English accent. #Quote by John Irving

#21. From the early days of European migration to America, in the 17th Century, the prototype of buildings was based on English precedent, even if mostly translated into the locally available material in abundance: timber. #Quote by Harry Seidler

#22. It seems only fair," Matthew continued. "A bit of karma, if you will." He twirled the stake again. "Shall we see how long you scream?"
"Are you ever going to shut up?" I snapped, fear and irritation filling me in equal measures. "This isn't your monologue, Hamlet. It's the battle scene, in case you've forgotten."
His eyes narrowed so fast they nearly sparked. They were the color of honey on fire. One of the others growled like an animal, low in his throat. It made all the hairs on my arms stand straight up.
I was going to die for making fun of Shakespeare.
My English Lit professor would be so proud. #Quote by Alyxandra Harvey

#23. He stopped. She heard the intake of his breath. "You are my country, Desdemona." Yearning, harsh and poignant and she felt herself swaying toward him. "My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining."
She gasped.
His gaze fell, shielded by his lashes. An odd, half-mocking smile played about his lips. "You'll never hear old Blake say something like that."
She swallowed, unable to speak, her senses abraded by his stimulating words, her pulse hammering in anticipation? Trepidation?
"Remember my words next time he calls you a bloody English rose. #Quote by Connie Brockway

#24. To the North-West I looked, and in the wide field of my glass, saw plain the bright glare of the fire from the Red Pit, shine upwards against the underside of the vast chin of the North-West Watcher - The Watching Thing of the North-West…. "That which hath Watched from the Beginning, and until the opening of the Gateway of Eternity" came into my thoughts, as I looked through the glass …

. #Quote by William Hope Hodgson

#25. My father is Cuban. Spanish was my first language, but I don't speak it that much anymore because I had dyslexia, and in school they work with you only in English. But I'm proud to be Latina, and most people don't know I am. #Quote by Bella Thorne

#26. I do revel slightly in the fact that I am what I am - an English, middle-class, public-school-educated bloke. There is a reputation with that of being slightly stiff, but whoever gets to know me will see some other element - whether it be vulnerable or silly or camp. #Quote by Elliot Cowan

#27. A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books. #Quote by Barbara Kingsolver

#28. How fortunate that it was an 'unconventional' party, where formalities are ruled out! On this basis Aziz found the English ladies easy to talk to, he treated them like men. Beauty would have troubled him, but Mrs Moore was so old and Miss Quested so plain that he was spared this anxiety. #Quote by E. M. Forster

#29. She imagined the trade in meanings as a kind of game, in which tokens shaped like mahjong tiles were exchanged and switched. Signs moved from one world to another, clacked together, made new sequences. A man in Bolshevik Russia became virtually Chinese; a world unfolded from a paper envelope. This game existed in the borderless continent of her father's head. She could see how he concentrated: 'cher' in Russian, 'neve' in Italian, 'snow' in English, until he arrived at the sound 'xue', and then the character: the radical symbol for rain, the strokes for frozen, the little block of marks that revealed the transition from alphabets to ideograms. #Quote by Gail Jones

#30. Sorry' is, indeed, one of the most difficult and most powerful words in the English language, provided one can feel and say it at the same time. It's difficult because you sincerely need to feel the pain of the other person and rise above your ego to say it; it's powerful because you overwhelm the other with the opposite reaction of what they were expecting. #Quote by Uday Mukerji

#31. He argument he was conducting with his neighbor as to whether the English magician had gone mad because he was a magician, or because he was English. #Quote by Susanna Clarke

#32. Carlos Tevez's English should be better than what it is #Quote by Graham Taylor

#33. If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door. #Quote by Michael Ondaatje

#34. I was chosen for 'Wolverine' because there weren't any other Japanese actresses available who could speak English. With 'Batman v Superman' and 'Hannibal,' I got the roles as a result of previous work I'd done, not just because of my nationality. #Quote by Tao Okamoto

#35. I do not want this cat. No, Nat. Not in a hat. Not in my flat. Not in the store, not anymore, just out the door.
if you please. #Quote by Josh Lanyon

#36. Every German child learns to speak English in school. #Quote by Cornelia Funke

#37. And practice this: 'Yo no soy una puta.'" Kyle said the words in an angry, accented voice.
Livia raised a sensitive, red, now-thin eyebrow at her sister.
"It means 'I am not a hooker' in Spanish. And you already know it in English, so you should be good. #Quote by Debra Anastasia

#38. Discussions about the ethics of suicide are immediately biased by the verb that customarily attaches to it in English. One "commits" suicide. Because this presupposes the wrongfulness of the suicide, I avoid that verb, opting instead for "carry out" suicide. This is evaluatively neutral, avoiding both the usual bias against suicide and the unusual bias in favor of it that the verb "achieve" would effect. "Carry out" is preferable to "practice", which implies something ongoing. Finally, "carry out" also implies a suicide that is completed rather than merely attempted. #Quote by David Benatar

#39. Freedom which in no other land will thrive, Freedom an English subject's sole prerogative. #Quote by John Dryden

#40. In standard American English, the word with the most gradations of meaning is probably run. The Random House unabridged dictionary offers one hundred and seventy-eight options, beginning with "to go quickly by moving the legs more rapidly than at a walk" and ending with "melted or liquefied." In #Quote by Stephen King

#41. I tend to curse in French more often than I do in English. #Quote by Alaina Huffman

#42. I found myself speaking more slowly (in an attempt to obey the Bible in speech), as if I was speaking French instead of English. #Quote by A. J. Jacobs

#43. Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American-Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common
and enough that separated them from everyone else
that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately. #Quote by Andrew Roberts

#44. Probably the best way to describe my writing style is to refer you to "purple prose", which was a tag given to the early mass market magazine writers earning a half cent a word for their fiction. They had to use every adjective, verb and adverb in the English language to add word count to stories in order to feed and support families. #Quote by Tom Johnson

#45. Susie: Hi Calvin! Aren't you excited about going to school? Look at all these great school supplies I got! I love having new notebooks and stuff!
Calvin:All I've got to say is they're not making me learn any foreign languages. If English is good enough for me, then by golly, it's good enough for the rest of the world! Everyone should just speak English or shut up, that's what I say!
Susie: You should maybe check the chemical content of your breakfast cereal. #Quote by Bill Watterson

#46. Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either! #Quote by Lewis Carroll