Top 1200 Middle English Quotes & Sayings

We are from the very middle class family. We have not come from the English medium school. We came from our regional languages school.

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.

The English, the English, The English are best: So Up with the English and Down with the Rest!

I grew up in a middle class English family just outside London. I wasn't surrounded by that speedy city lifestyle, it was a little mellower.

In the 19th century, the English were loathed. Every memoir that you read of that period, indicates the loathing that everybody felt for the English, the only difference between the English and Americans, in this respect, is the English rather liked being loathed and the Americans apparently dislike it intensely.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

My English was limited to vacationing and not really engaging with Americans. I knew 'shopping' and 'eating' English - I could say 'blue sweater,' 'creme brulee,' and 'Caesar salad,' - so I came here thinking I spoke English.

There seems also to be a tremendous risk to indigenous cultures if we insist that all scholarship be conducted in English. We are, for example, dealing with ancient and very highly-developed cultures in Korea, Japan, China and the Middle East. What is the impact on cultural and scholarly vitality forcing everyone to do their work in English? I do not have an answer, but this issue has been very much on my mind.

Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.

I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America in the middle of the last century.

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.

If you do not learn English in this country, you cannot get anywhere. We are in America. We are not in Mexico, we are not in China, we are not in Saudi Arabia - we speak English in this country! And what bilingual education does, is keep them from learning English, so they are doomed to be second-class citizens.

I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.

I'm English, without a doubt. I will never ever say I'm not English. English born and bred. I'm Turkish, though

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.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.

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.

Not long time ago there was a striking example of the extent to which English has diverged: a television company put out a programme filmed in the English city of Newcastle, where the local variety of English is famously divergent and difficult, and the televised version was accompanied by English subtitles!

I'm a middle-bracket person with a middle-bracket spouse / And we live together gaily in a middle-bracket house. / We've a fair-to-middlin' family; we take the middle view; / So we're manna sent from heaven to internal revenue.

I just write like a grown man, because that's what I listen to. I'm not even speaking complicated English... I don't do five-syllable words, I don't do four-syllable words. This is English. Rudimentary English.

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.

English is no problem for me because I am actually English. My whole family are English; I was brought up listening to various forms of the English accent.

I grew up in the Middle East. My folks have a very thick, kind of Oklahoma accent; that's where I was born. But we moved to the Middle East right after I was born, so I guess we were surrounded by English people and French people.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

It's fantastic for Arsenal, and for English football as well. You've got an English club with a lot of young English talent committing themselves to a club.

People are always saying, English, English, English rose, and I just feel so completely different.

When you go to school in Holland you learn to speak English and write in English - but English is different from the Scottish language!

I have a funny story to tell about English and how I came to fall in love with the language. I was desperate to fit in and spoke English all the time. Trouble was, in my household it was a no-no to speak English because somehow it is disrespectful to call parents and grandparents "you" - impersonal pronouns are offensive in Vietnamese.

I saw Chekhov a number of times in English, and I thought that it translates very well in English, for some reason, from the Russian to the English.

what has been termed 'correct' English is nothing other than the blatant legitimation of the white middle-class code.

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.

James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking in Gaelic. I've sung songs that if they were in English, would have been banned too. The psyche of the Irish language is completely different to the English-speaking world.

I think English is very important for tennis players. To be on the tour, it's much more easier if you speak English. So that's why I knew that I have to improve my English.

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.

I felt like, I need to do English music; I speak better English than I do Korean. I think the fans enjoy it as well, so let's start making music in English.

I'd love to see more middle and high school teachers who are not teaching English develop classroom libraries. Our message to kids should be that reading is for everyone.

In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules.

The argument that there was a social pathology of the English Reformation, that there were fundamental changes in English society and the English church which made the Reformation inevitable, is academically stone dead.

I wish I could adjust my voice, but it's just what's happened to me. It's because I've lived abroad for a long time, and my wife is English and my kids all have English accents, and every voice I hear is English. I've never intentionally changed my accent at all.

I want to speak English perfectly. In fact, I want to speak English just like I fight, and, until that moment, I find it very hard to do an interview solely in English.

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.

A lot of the demos I write are all in English, so releasing music in English isn't translating to English, it's just keeping them in English.

My English is closer to the literary English, and I'm not very familiar with jokes in English or with, you know, with small talk in English.

My fitness trainer's English, my physio's English, some of my friends are English. I don't have a problem with English people at all.

Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.

Having an interview in English is difficult for me, but acting in English is much harder. Because when I'm acting in English, if someone points out bad pronunciation or accent, I cannot focus on my emotions anymore, so it was very hard.

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

English was always my favorite subject in middle school and high school.

We do not for example say that the person has a perfect knowledge of some language L similar to English but still different from it. What we say is that the child or foreigner has a 'partial knowledge of English' or is 'on his or her way' towards acquiring knowledge of English, and if they reach this goal, they will then know English.

...I don't understand this gap you see between us, but can't you meet me somewhere in the middle?" "The middle of what?" "I don't know, the middle of tomorrow and forever, the middle of life and death, the middle of normal and paranormal. Where we've always been." I bit my lip, nodding against his forehead. "There's a place for us there, right?" "Always." He put his lips to mine, sealing our own little spot in the world. Together.

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

I have a dog. It's an English mastiff called Dolly. Her middle name is Poppy.

Mrs. Miniver was an ordinary middle-class English housewife, a character created by Jan Struther when she was commissioned by the 'Times of London' to write a weekly 'cheer-up' article in 1937.

English is not the primary language for universities in China, Korea, and Japan, but they are being evaluated on the basis of publications in English and courses taught in English.

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.