A Quote by John Jeremiah Sullivan
It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.
Related Quotes
It is a curious fact that the word essayist showed up in English before it existed in French.
I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.
It's a complicated process being so bilingual. Sometimes it's a mere word or sentence that comes to me, if I'm writing the book in English, in French. It's not always easy to deal with. Sometimes even during an interview somebody can ask me a question in English that I want to answer in French and vice versa - that's the story of my life!
There was never a choice to sing in English or French, that's the thing. We started a band and sang right away in English. You reproduce the thing you like, and most of the bands we liked were coming from England or the U.S. We also came to cherish the fact that there was no one in France singing in English -we were so happy Phoenix to be the first. Even if we are traitors to France, our country, which I'll never understand, because we talk about things that are very French.
I have been in countries where I don't know a word of the language. I tried to practice my French as much as possible. I would talk with the crew. I always order in French, but then waiters respond in English. I hate that.
Fair play is an English word. It is not a French word, and it has been copied all over the world. Unfortunately, it does not function any more here.
The most terrible of all my battles was the one before Moscow. The French showed themselves to be worthy of victory, but the Russians showed themselves worthy of being invincible.
Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.
It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.
It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.
I speak French, and I grew up with French, so my English is Franglais.
My dad's French, and I spent my summers in France growing up. So I speak French fluently, and obviously, I speak English because I was raised in New York, and I grew up here.
Word lessons, in particular the wouldst couldst shouldst have loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of French, Latin, and English grammars to memory.
There is no word in English for chic. Why should there be? Everything chic is by legend French. Perhaps everything chic is in reality French.
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.
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