A Quote by Helene Hanff

I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. “Which is all very well,” she said bitterly, “but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is ‘How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall’.

Helene Hanff

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About Anglo-Saxon Any Chaucer Choosing Early English Enough Essay Find Friend Had Hall Having Her How Learning Mead Men Middle Middle English Never Only Out Own Read Said She Slaughter Subject Take Talked Thousand Very Well Which Words Write

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Helene Hanff
American - Writer
April 15, 1916 - April 9, 1997

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.

James Fenton

I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.

Zora Neale Hurston

The early 20th Century was probably the high tide of global white supremacy - I'm going to call it that because that's how people thought of it - and to be specific, Anglo-Saxon supremacy: The idea that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were at the top of the world, representing the highest achievement possible for all of humanity, with Darwin's theories being used to prop up this belief.

George Elliott Clarke

The Anglo-Saxon conscience does not prevent the Anglo-Saxon from sinning, it merely prevents him from enjoying his sin.

Salvador de Madariaga

Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.

Ilana Mercer

There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of "Anglo-Saxon Law." And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.

Noam Chomsky

France is a fantastic country. It's between the Anglo-Saxon and Latin cultures. We have some of the Anglo-Saxon rigor, and some of the Latin quirkiness.

Xavier Niel

What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stickout above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies.

H. L. Mencken

Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.

Dorothy L. Sayers

I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo-Saxons such tremendous power that Europe will become a bloc under Anglo-Saxon domination. If that is the case, it will be a very good thing. I wonder whether Stalin will be able to stand up to the others as he has done in the past.

Werner Heisenberg

The American model was celebrated by Thatcherites and New Labour alike, California worshipped as the model of the future, 'Anglo-Saxon' embalmed as the fitting metaphor for the shared Anglo-American legacy, Europe denigrated and the rest of the world ignored.

Martin Jacques

It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.

H. L. Mencken

Spanish and English have such different music, and in my own poetry I feel much less drawn to fluid sounds than I do toward the hard sounds and rhythms that come out of the Anglo-Saxon roots of English.

Joan Larkin

Traditional Anglo-Saxon intolerance is a local and temporal culture trait like any other.

Ruth Benedict

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

Seamus Heaney

Making jokes is about the most wrong and stupid thing a bemused, middle-aged, white heterosexual Anglo Saxon sort of Celt Australian male can do these days.

Michael Leunig

A Quote by Helene Hanff

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