English Language Quotes

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“I don't like the words 'I'm fine'. My mom tells me those two words are the most-frequently-told lie in the English lenguage.”
― Kasie West, The Fill-In Boyfriend

“There are countries out there where people speak English. But not like us - we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It's hard to imagine, but English is the real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don't have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt. How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lurics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures - even the buttons in the lift! - are in their private language. They may be understood by anuone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths. They must have to write things down in special codes. Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them - they are accessible to everyone and everything! I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one else is using anyway, just so that for once they can have something just for them.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.


Glanzvoller Stern! wär ich so stet wie du,
Nicht hing ich nachts in einsam stolzer Pracht!
SchautŽ nicht mit ewigem Blick beiseite zu,
Einsiedler der Natur, auf hoher Wacht
Beim Priesterwerk der Reinigung, das die See,
Die wogende, vollbringt am Meeresstrand;
Noch starrt ich auf die Maske, die der Schnee
Sanft fallend frisch um Berg und Moore band.
Nein, doch unwandelbar und unentwegt
MöchtŽ ruhn ich an der Liebsten weicher Brust,
Zu fühlen, wie es wogend dort sich regt,
Zu wachen ewig in unruhiger Lust,
Zu lauschen auf des Atems sanftes Wehen -
So ewig leben - sonst im Tod vergehen!”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.”
― John H. McWhorter, Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English

“What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Who said the British empire was gone?! When I travel around the world and see and hear the English language everywhere, I know that the empire on which the sun never sets, is still alive. It never died. It continued to exist, but in a different shape, its language, English, which has become the global language.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“English is the product of a Saxon warrior trying to make a date with an Angle bar-maid, and as such is no more legitimate than any of the other products of that conversation.”
― H. Beam Piper, Fuzzy Sapiens

“The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs”
― Stephen Fry

“Languages are like beings:
they thrive, take a dive,
and need care to survive.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“It is as much about input – the conversation of imaginative men (women and children not excluded) has a rhythm, a phrase that follows a thought and precedes the development of further thought … try not to be a cunt.”
― Gordon Roddick

“Poetry is a distinct category of language—a special way of speaking that invites and rewards a special way of listening.”
― Dana Gioia

“Be grateful, as the friendship of vowels and consonants gives birth to syllables and new words. That is the extent of your great power.”
— Judge Wisdomar, from Fairytale Clues”
― Ollie Kayuro, Fairytale Clues, Storybook 1: Magic Stories That Slip English Grammar Into The Heart

“The smug grin of a thought well described, the laughter as others connect with the thought well received, a light of recognition, a delight of recognition switched on, triggered by words.”
― Gordon Roddick

“Even though English is the universal language of earth, due to its primitive colonial escapades, and indeed the most convenient, it is neither the most beautiful nor the most soulful language on earth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“English teacher. Though it's been made less secret by the Sold a Story podcast, American schools have been peddled and been disseminating a flawed program for teaching reading for decades. Its known as 3-cueing. This has badly exacerbated literacy deficiencies and the general decline of American schools.

What's scarier is this: research overwhelmingly shows that reading skills crystallize after traditional phonics instruction ends. It's known as the Matthew effect. In other words, if a child isn't reading proficiently by the time they're supposed to, they will likely NEVER become proficient readers.

So as a secondary language Arts Teacher, there's a really depressing undercurrent to what I do: if a student is a poor reader when they get to me...well, the damage is done.”
― Anonymous

“Some 40 per cent of the 15,000 words in Shakespeare’s works were of French origin. The same percentage can be found in the current English version of the Bible.

Évidemment, I make no bones about that. This is a book written in bad faith. It’s a French book. So (it is) arrogant.

English, full of French, Norman and Latin, is more of a Romance language than a Germanic one. Its Saxon backbone is clothed in a luxuriant and precious Roman flesh.”
― Bernard Cerquiglini, La langue anglaise n'existe pas: C'est du français mal prononcé

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“If the word "clear" is imprecise, it is mercifully so. And not necessarily to the detriment of meaning. "It is clear that..." carries with it a bit of transparent glass, the bright ring of a bell, a sunny day, a candid conversation, an uncluttered table.”
― Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages

“Sometimes, to get love, 'Azāzīl needs to become Iblis.”
― Adil Alzarooni, The Red Island: The Gatekeeper

“I thought that directness spoke for itself, but hadn’t realized that the English like their ritual and distrust plain speaking as somehow mendacious. Everything has a hidden meaning, does it not? And the more direct the speech, the more carefully hidden the true meaning must be, the more effort must be expended to understand what is really being said.”
― Iain Pears, [The Portrait] (By: Iain Pears) [published: July, 2005]

“If accuracy, fidelity, and the strictest attention to the letter of the text, be supposed to constitute the qualities of an excellent version, this of all versions, must, in general, be accounted the most excellent. Every sentence, every word, every syllable, and every letter and point, seems to have been weighed with the nicest exactitude; and expressed, either in the text, or margin, with the greatest precision”
― Father Alexander Geddes

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― Fatima Farheen Mirza

“Now Scots, it must be observed, is not English badly spelled; nor is it a dialect of English. To simplify, but not in a direction away from the truth; the Scots language was a development - and by now is a degeneration - of the Anglian branch of what is called Old English, and was originally spoken from the Forth to the Humber - that's to say, on both sides of the Border. The Saxon branch to the South flourished and became what we call English. With the establishment of the Border, the Anglian branch developed as Scots. Scots and English, therefore, are cousin languages with a common ancestor, and it is as absurdto call Scots a dialect of English as it would be to call English a dialect of Scots.”
― Norman MacCaig, Scottish Eccentrics

“The language of this Poeme is (as thou seeist) mixt of the English and Scottish Dialects; which perhaps may be vnpleasant and irksome to some readers of both nations. But I hope the gentle and judicious English reader will beare with me, if I retaine some badge of mine owne countrie, by vsing sometimes words that are peculiar therevnto, especiallie when I finde them propre, and significant. And as for my owne countrymen, they may not justly finde fault with me, if for the more parte I vse the English phrase, as worthie to be preferred before our owne for the elegance and perfection thereof. Yea I am perswaded that both countrie-men will take in good part the mixture of their Dialects, the rather for that the bountiful providence of God doth invite them both to a staiter vnion and conjunction aswell in languages as in other respectes.”
― William Alexander, The Tragedie of Darius

“We may even conclude it to be an evidence of strength, rather than of weakness, that the Scots language and the Scottish literature did not maintain a separate existance. Scottish, throwing in its luck with English, has not only much greater chance of survival, but contributes important elements of strength to complete the English...”
― T.S. Eliot

“Scots words to tell to your heart how they wrung it and held it, the toil of their days and unendingly their fight. And the next minute that passed from you, you were English, back to the English words so sharp and clean and true - for a while, till they slid so smooth from your throat you knew they could never say anything that was worth the saying at all.”
― Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite

“In the nonlocal model,” she continued, “your brain does not create consciousness, but rather your brain experiences what already exists around it.”

She glanced from Faukman to Langdon and back. “In simple English, our brains interact with an existing matrix of awareness.” “That was simple English?” Faukman looked bemused. “Count your blessings,” Langdon said. “She could ruin lunch by trying to explain the triadic dimensional vortical paradigm.”

“Seriously, Robert?” she chided. “A man of your intellectual capacity should be able to grasp a nine-dimensional quantized, volumetric reality embedded in an infinite continuity.” Langdon rolled his eyes.

“See what I mean?” “Kids.” Faukman held up his hands. “Don’t make me stop the car.”
― Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets