A Quote by Monique Roffey

Trinidadians love speaking their own English; it's full of poetic forms and can be playful and lyrical and comical. Trinidadians are verbal acrobats, and I love being on the island just to hear the people speak.

Monique Roffey

Quote Topics

Being Comical English Forms Full Hear Island Just Love Lyrical Own People Playful Poetic Speak Speaking Trinidadians Verbal

Quote Author

Monique Roffey
British - Writer
Born: 1965

I still love poetic imagery. I love the idea of using surrealist speak to generate lyrical content and I love the way English can be exciting in and of itself.

Jeff Tweedy

When you sing in English and Spanish, it's two completely different forms of expression and... even the people who don't speak Spanish love to hear me sing in Spanish.

Gloria Estefan

You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense.

Thornton Wilder

Icelanders love to speak English. Their English is a joy to hear because of how colloquial and idiomatic it is, but they appreciate your efforts with Icelandic.

John Grant

I can only speak for myself, and hope people hear my words and see me on television speaking for myself. And, hopefully, they'll be able to make their own judgment. And at the end of the day, I just want my work to speak for itself.

Jennifer Lopez

I love to see people's faces change when they hear me speak English, and they realize how far I have been able to go.

Nicky Jam

I love to see people's faces change when they hear me speak English and they realize how far I have been able to go.

Nicky Jam

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.

John Henrik Clarke

My mother always accused me of being in love with the sound of my own voice. When we went on road trips, she'd be like, 'Stop singing. Be quiet, you're talking just to hear yourself speak.' It was probably true. I like to ramble on, which is probably why I'm well suited to interviews. You know, there's no other forum where you're literally supposed to sit down and just talk for hours about yourself. I love it.

Ben Affleck

In terms of men being feminist allies, it's just important to speak from your own place. I'd love to hear men singing about masculinity and the damage it does to them.

Kathleen Hanna

"When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.

Russell Baker

I guess the argument is you chose to be in the public eye and, therefore, you're giving your life up for a certain level of scrutiny and you've got to accept that. The trade-off between being on 'Love Island' and not being on 'Love Island' is very skewed into the positive.

Iain Stirling

English has always been my musical language. When I started writing songs when I was 13 or 14, I started writing in English because it's the language in between. I speak Finnish, I speak French, so I'll write songs in English because that's the music I listen to. I learned so much poetry and the poetic way of expressing myself is in English.

Olivia Merilahti

In life, you have to take the pace that love goes. You don't force it. You just don't force love, you don't force falling in love, you don't force being in love - you just become. I don't know how to say that in English, but you just feel it.