English Quotes
Most popular English quotes
If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.
Our language is funny—a fat chance and a slim chance are the same thing.
Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.
Speak English like it tastes good.
English is the great Wurlitzer of language, the most perfect all-purpose instrument ever invented.
English, n. A language so haughty and reserved that few writers succeed in getting on terms of familiarity with it.
English took time to emerge as the common tongue. There had been luck, but also cunning and the beginnings of what was to become English's most subtle and ruthless characteristic of all: its capacity to absorb others.
One cannot but be impressed by the amazing hospitality of the English language.
English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans, and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance, with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.
It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
I have always had a deep and abiding love for the English language. I've always loved the flirtatious tango of consonants and vowels, the sturdy dependability of nouns and the capricious whimsy of verbs, the strutting pageantry of the adjective and the flitting evanescence of the adverb, all kept safe and orderly by those reliable little policeman, punctuation marks.
The circle of the English language has a well-defined center but no discernible circumference.
He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.
Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.
A Bawdy Language: How a Second-Rate Language Slept Its Way to the Top.
English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots; and those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves. The Empire is striking back.
English is a stretch language; one size fits all.
English is a beautiful, bewildering language, and the deeper you dive into it, the more effort it takes to come up to the surface for air.
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
Lexicographers spend a lifetime swimming through the English language in a way that no one else does; the very nature of lexicography demands it.
