Top 1200 English Grammar Quotes & Sayings - Page 11

Ian Carroll grew up in Melbourne, went to Carey Grammar and then studied political science at Monash University during the turbulent years of anti-Vietnam rebellion.

After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

Until the age of five, my parents spoke to me in Chinese or a combination of Chinese and English, but they didn't force me to speak Mandarin. In retrospect, this was sad, because they believed that my chance of doing well in America hinged on my fluency in English. Later, as an adult, I wanted to learn Chinese.

When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn't speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they're not very forgiving. 'If you don't speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?'

Your grammar is a reflection of your image. Good or bad, you have made an impression. And like all impressions, you are in total control.

It's easier for me to act in Spanish, but as soon as I get the lines in English and I know them by heart, it becomes really easy. You don't have to worry about the language anymore. It just takes more time. In Spanish, I can learn lines in 10 minutes. In English, it's going to take an hour.

My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

Joss Whedon writes beautiful drama. His sensitivity and his sense of drama and scenes are pretty exceptional. There's no one else writing like him, really, in sci-fi and TV. That's not to say there are no astonishing writers on TV. I was nervous about coming to America and playing an English person who speaks very English when all the writers are American, because it's a very particular thing to imitate, and if it's badly imitated, it sounds painfully contorted and silly. And he writes very well for English people. It was Joss Whedon who persuaded me.

I love England and I love English culture, particularly English pop culture.

I learned English from watching American movies and American series. And you'd watch the movie the first time and not understand anything. Then you'd watch it again, and you'd start understanding more and more, and that's how I learned English.

My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.

I think in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne. Very interesting character because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different.

When I was at Paisley Grammar we were equipped to compete with the private-school kids - and encouraged to do so. The sky was the limit, provided we had ability, ambition and a capacity for hard work.

When I came here, I couldn't speak a word of English, but my sex life was perfect. Now my English is perfect but my sex life is rubbish

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies that have moulded them

You may be right in believing that if you study hard, one day you might become fluent in English. But you will still look Chinese, and when people meet you, they’ll see a Chinese girl no matter how well you speak English. You’ll always be expected to know Chinese, and if you don’t, I’m afraid they will not respect you as much.

I was terrible in English. I couldn't stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention--it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature. Any word can be spelled just as well a different way.

Both of my parents sacrificed a lot. My dad, Tero, would drive me to training every single day. My mum, Teija, came to Seville to help me. She did everything for me. It was such a big place to go at 17. Even if you can speak English, it doesn't matter there. It was all Spanish. They don't do English.

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.

English actors feel vaguely apologetic for being there at all. American actors know that the most important thing is to get one take out of fifty that is great, and they'll go to any length to get it. The English are used to working within consistently small, low-budget things and think, I mustn't waste their time.

I'm not arguing for a return to the grammar school system, but there must be a way of identifying bright kids from ordinary backgrounds and giving them a world-class education.

What is a game like 'No Man's Sky,' really? A set of symbols that specify a world but do not themselves constitute it. A rich grammar that's inert without the trigger of human attention.

What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

My dad is an ob-gyn - he's retired now - and he wanted to come to the States to make a better life, for opportunity. My mom said that, on the plane ride here, I did not want to speak a word of English - I spoke Tagalog. And then, after the first day of school, I didn't want to speak anything but English.

I work in Hebrew. Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages. Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English. The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages. Every language has influences and is an influence.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

Learning the Italian was tough. I tried to really come at from a purist perspective, really learn the grammar, syntax and conjugations.

At age 11 in 1960, I moved to an academic state secondary school, Harrow County Grammar School for Boys.

Neither said anything while they embraced. Sometimes words didn't go far enough, the vessels of letters and the ladles of grammar incapable of holding the heart's sentiments.

I am the Roman Emperor, and am above grammar.

Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.

I don't follow anything blindly. I have to know the entire thing, if I have to get in to it. It might sound funny to you, but it's like using English language. I use an English word only when I know its meaning and understand its connotation. You won't hear me say, 'What's up, dude' or anything like that just for the heck of it.

Mr Robert Montgomery's genius [is] far too free and aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax? [His] readers must take such grammar as they can get and be thankful.

Texting has reduced the number of waste words, but it has also exposed a black hole of ignorance about traditional - what a cranky guy would call correct - grammar.

I think most people agree there is a component of skill in art making; you have to learn grammar before you learn how to write.

The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a workaday world can but seldom afford.

The short English miles are delightful for walking. You are always pleased to find, every now and then, in how short a time you have walked a mile, though, no doubt, a mile is everywhere a mile, I walk but a moderate pace, and can accomplish four English miles in an hour.

Being born white in South Africa or anywhere in the empire and Commonwealth automatically conferred this special status. You had no problem finding a place to live, a job, trade union membership, access to social services. Being white, speaking English, you were accepted as English, entitled to all the rights of citizenship.

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!

I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

First grade was - I spoke only Spanish, and second grade - probably a bit more English. And by the time I hit third grade, I was learning, of course, much, much more English.

If grammar is medicine, then Roy Clark gives us the spoonful of sugar to help it go down. A wonderful tour through the labyrinth of language.

Actually, I've taught creative writing in Turkey, at an English language university, where the students were native Turkish speakers, but they were writing their essays in English, and they were very interesting - even the sense of structure, the conventions of writing, the different styles of writing.

I moved to New Jersey when I was five, and I lived there for about six years. My dad was allocated to the New York branch of his company. Looking back, I'm so grateful because I got to learn both English and Korean at the same time, and it was just so natural for me, and it made it so much easier to study English afterwards.

I am not afraid of death threats, but I am appalled that so many people are capable of so much wrong spelling and fractured grammar!

It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it's just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students' repertoire rather than teaching them out of what's thought of as a bad habit, like sloppy posture or chewing with your mouth open.

Because it was my first time acting in English, everyone on set was difficult to understand. It was a mix of Scottish, Irish, British and American English. To understand a Scottish accent or an Irish accent was so hard.

The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.

Certainly, historically, there has been more attention given in the international media to Indian English-language writers than to Pakistani English-language writers. But that, in my opinion, was justified by the sheer number of excellent writers coming from India and the Indian diaspora.

Grammar schools are public schools without the sodomy.

When I was playing in the Ajax youth teams - when I was, say, 14, 15 - you started to get all those international youth tournaments. All those English teams came. Well, the English were much further than we were.

I don't know grammar but I do know that I love playing games on my phone.

Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented.

When I decided I wanted to go to drama school, I realized that a lot of the actors whose careers I really admire and whose work I really admire were English and English trained. I felt there was a real vocational feel to work in the U.K.

A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in.

Reading and writing, arithmetic and grammar do not constitute education, any more than a knife, fork and spoon constitute a dinner.