Unable to love each other, the English turn naturally to dogs
I was born in Wales but I'm not Welsh - I'm English.
You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.
I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.
I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time, to say high Anglo-Catholic would be a real English understatement.
On the one hand, there is no question that English - frequently bad English - has become the universal language of scholarship. It is clearly a tremendous handicap for people outside of the United States, Britain, and Australia and a few other countries because few of them are native speakers, but we demand that they present and publish in English.
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine powers.
Hebrew has a system of tenses, which is, in a big way, different from the English system of tenses, probably different than any European system of tenses, which means a different sense of reality, which means a different concept of time.
Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!
You don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be?
I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they’ve made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.
Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language.
Cure" is one of the most precious words in the English language. It's a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn't so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children's children?
The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.
Americans like to think 'Python' is how English people really are. There is an element of truth to that.
A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.
The average college graduate's proficient literacy in English [the ability to read lengthy, complex texts and draw complicated inferences] has declined from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent ten years later.
Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.
I was born in Texas and I lived there 'till I was 8. Then I moved to the Dominican Republic with my mom, lived there for two years and forgot every word of English I knew.