A Quote by John Updike

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

John Updike

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John Updike
American - Novelist
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

Muriel, my mother, was my main confidant. She was a teacher of English at Watford grammar school but took a break while my sister Madeleine and I were children. She held court in the kitchen, and we talked about everything.

John Sulston

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

David Crystal

When I was in school, in eighth grade, someone recognized something in me. She was an English teacher, and we read a play out loud in class, and she asked me to read one of the roles. I'd never done anything like that before, but something just lit up.

David Morse

My father was English. He date-raped my mother so she's hated English men ever since. You know my boyfriend's English, and I'm, uh, I'm half-English, which she's never been real happy about. If she finds out I'm dating someone English, she'll ah, think I' turning my back on her and becoming a foreigner.' Cathy, that's the stupidest reason I've ever heard.

Jeaniene Frost

My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to read early on - not only in English, but in Hindi, too. My teachers didn't like the fact that I was reading more quickly than they were teaching, and as a consequence, I would sometimes get bored in class.

Sanjeev Bhaskar

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive.

Daniel Tammet

No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.

Richard Whately

The revival of Hebrew, as a spoken language, is a fascinating story, which I'm afraid I cannot squeeze into a few sentences. But, let me give you a clue. 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. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.

Amos Oz

I'm into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

Taron Egerton

I'm into books - I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

Taron Egerton

I had a very good English teacher who said to me that she thought I ought to do it. She - I don't know, she saw something thank goodness because I think if it hadn't been encouraged by somebody that serious, I'm not sure what would've happened to me.

Maggie Smith

My mom speaks English - she moved to England in the '70s, so she's fluent in English. We use to speak in Spanish when I was a kid all the time, me and my mom. But when I went to boarding school, I kind of lost it a little bit.

Ed Weeks

It would also have been helpful to have gone to a Catholic grammar school. The only people who know grammar are those people who went to Catholic grammar school. Those nuns beat it into them.

Fran Lebowitz

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

William Labov

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.

Robert Graves

I grew up bilingual, I grew up speaking Chinese in the home, Mandarin Chinese with my parents, and I learned English because I was born and raised in the U.S. That really gave me an edge. I understand that, from the experts, if you grew up bilingual, your brain kind of gets wired to accept a new language. It was a very serious deal because not only did I have to learn Russian to a high degree in order to function as a necessary member of the crew, but also I knew that the Russians that came over that made an effort and had some success in learning English, those were the folks we trusted.

Leroy Chiao

A Quote by John Updike

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