English Language Quotes - Page 7

• The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

  Amos Oz

  Latin, Language, Nordic

  "'Everybody comes from somewhere.' An Interview with Writer Amos Oz". Interview with Prashanth Ramakrishna, logger.believermag.com. October 20, 2016.

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• The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of

  William Carlos Williams

  Language, Heard, Idiom

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• You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Character, Mean

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• I don't think there's any words in the English language to explain what it's -what it's like to- to sit on Texas death row and your thoughts are laying on that gurney, convicted but innocent and being put to death.

  Kerry Max Cook

  Thinking, Texas, Death Penalty

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• Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.

  Julia Penelope

  Men, World, Language

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• I think one of the best words in the English language is compassion. I think it holds everything. It holds love, it holds care... and if everybody just did something. We all make a difference.

  Michael Crawford

  Thinking, Compassion, Differences

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• The lyrics are not an important thing to me. In fact, it can be a distraction. If I knew the language enough to know it was a horrible love song with stupid lyrics - like most of the popular songs are today in the English language that I hear - then it would be much more of a turnoff then if it would allow me to interpret it from the expressive capabilities of the vocalizing or of the sound itself, which allows me to create my own meaning for it, which elevates it into a higher piece of work for me.

  Alan Bishop

  Song, Stupid, Important

  "An Interview with Alan Bishop". believermag.com. July 1, 2008.

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• Probably no theologian in English language has ever rivaled Owen stressing the absolute centrality of Christ's penal substitution and therefore his as Priest. . . . For that reason alone The Priesthood of Christ is worth all the time it takes to read it with humility, care, and reflection.

  Sinclair B. Ferguson

  Stress, Humility, Reflection

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• Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions.

  Amos Oz

  Thinking, Volcanoes, Lava

  "'Everybody comes from somewhere.' An Interview with Writer Amos Oz". Interview with Prashanth Ramakrishna, logger.believermag.com. October 20, 2016.

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• Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.

  Teju Cole

  Beautiful, Moving, Writing

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I love John Ashbery. He's the - really the poet laureate of English language poetry, whether he's given that or not, he is to me.

  Jim Jarmusch

  Language, Poet, Given

  "Jim Jarmusch On Iggy Pop, Hip-Hop And Finding Poetry In Mundane Things". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, news.wfsu.org. January 31, 2017.

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• I was also in love with the English language.

  Dick Schaap

  Language

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• If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.

  A. A. Milne

  Writing, Play, History

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• It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language.

  A. E. van Vogt

  Break Up, Breakup, Interesting

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• He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more... well, pleasant.

  Mary Balogh

  Mean, Devil, Why Not

  Mary Balogh (2009). “Then Comes Seduction”, p.230, Dell

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• I love to laugh, it's my main thing. I love to abuse the English language.

  Dan Fogelberg

  Love, Laughing, Abuse

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• What's great is we actually have friends who belong or have previously belonged to the Amish community, so we got first hand stories and I was able to talk with them about visitors and visiting the Amish country. It was very enlightening to think this is very much going on as we speak. What was really interesting was that the upcoming Amish generation is actually closer to average American teenager in their use of the English language because of the use of technology.

  Alyson Stoner

  Country, Teenager, Thinking

  Source: www.nerdprobs.com

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• There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven. Bad words. That's what they told us they were, remember? 'That's a bad word.' You know bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions.

  George Carlin

  People, Groups, Use

  "George Carlin (1937–2008): Legendary Comedian Challenged Status Quo Throughout 50-Year Career". "Democracy Now!" with Amy Goodman, www.democracynow.org. June 24, 2008.

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• Artists are perennially implored to consider 'the limitations of the medium.' Whoever invented this expression exaggerated the limitations of the English language. We are not concerned with what effects cannot be produced with our materials.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Artist, Expression, Language

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• The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than "The doctor will see you now." I am willing to concede something to the phrase "Have you anything to say before the current is turned on?" That may be worse for the moment, but it doesn't last so long. For continued, unmitigating depression, I know nothing to equal "The doctor will see you now." But I'm not narrow-minded about it. I'm willing to consider other possibilities.

  Robert Benchley

  Doctors, Long, May

  Robert Benchley (1922). “Love Conquers All”

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• The world was made before English language, and seemingly upon a different design.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Design, Different, World

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1999). “The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays”, p.97, Cooper Square Press

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• No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.

  Sam Rayburn

  Inspirational, Book, Communication

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• You and I must realize that the English language is filled with words that, in addition to their literal meanings, convey distinct emotional intensity. For example, if you develop a habit of saying you 'hate' things - you 'hate' your hair; you 'hate' your job; you 'hate' having to do something - do you think this raises the intensity of your negative emotional states more than if you use a phrase like 'I prefer something else'?

  Tony Robbins

  Motivational, Jobs, Hate

  Tony Robbins (2007). “Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial”, p.202, Simon and Schuster

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• I can hardly believe that I even know this, but I am aware that Noah Webster's original dictionary, apart from being the first truly American lexicography, was a kind of line in the sand. It claimed a very discrete, American form of the English language, explicitly to compare it to the English of our erstwhile colonial masters who had been operating under Dr. Johnson's dictionary rules for well over a century.

  Bob Garfield

  Believe, Language, Kind

  Source: www.slate.com

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• But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn't doing his part as an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. . . We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Loyalty, Men, America

  Theodore Roosevelt (1941). “Theodore Roosevelt Cyclopedia”

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