A Quote by John Steinbeck

How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)

John Steinbeck

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Administration Beauty Boys Cannot Communication Eisenhower English Himself How John Language Letter My Boys President Private Put Reads Sentence Simple Teach Thus Together Value Westerns Written

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John Steinbeck
American - Author
February 27, 1902 - December 20, 1968

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain Beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you've spoken or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognise a well-tuned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skilfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, to see it quite naked, in a way.

Muriel Barbery

There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

Harper Lee

There is no other genre that deals with America better, in a subtextual way, than the Westerns being made in the different decades. The '50s Westerns very much put forth an Eisenhower idea of America, whereas the Westerns of the '70s were very cynical about America.

Quentin Tarantino

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Senator John Kerry, who is running for president, said that when he voted for the war in Iraq, he didn't expect President Bush to 'f--- it up as badly as he did.' Here's some breaking news, tomorrow former Vice President Al Gore expected to endorse Howard Dean as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States - and you thought John Kerry was using four letter words before! Actually, to John Kerry, Dean is a four letter word.

Jay Leno

Some stories I write in Swedish, some in English. Short stories I've almost exclusively written in English lately, mostly because there's such a small market for them in Sweden and it doesn't really pay either. So, the translation goes both ways. What also factors in is that I have a different voice in English, which means that a straight translation wouldn't be the same as if I'd written it in English originally.

Karin Tidbeck

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together. But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

Catherynne M. Valente

The test of a good letter is a very simple one. If one seems to hear the other person talking as one reads, it is a good letter.

A. C. Benson

I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.

William Safire

The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it soundslike.It isimpossible foran Englishmanto openhis mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

George Bernard Shaw

'I am' is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that 'I do' is the longest sentence?

George Carlin

In 2004, President Bush gave Prime Minister Sharon certain guarantees about American policy, but the Obama administration treated those as a kind of private letter having no binding policy impact.

Elliott Abrams

I never taught language for the purpose of teaching it; but invariably used language as a medium for the communication of thought; thus the learning of language was coincident with the acquisition of knowledge.

Anne Sullivan Macy

I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.

Mark Takano

My mother always spoke to me in English, so it's technically my maternal language, and it became a kind of private language - I was happy that I could speak in English to my mum and the majority of people wouldn't understand it.

Lou Doillon

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

Samuel Johnson

A Quote by John Steinbeck

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