Top 1200 Old English Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English...?

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.

I've never seen an 'English' books section in, well, an English bookshop, but in Scotland, most bookshops have a set of shelves dedicated to Scottish authors.

Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English.

English is English, no matter what accent you speak it in.

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.

England and Greece are friends. English blood was shed on Greek soil in the war against fascism, and Greeks gave their lives to protect English pilots.

The transition from an English father to a Punjabi stepfather demanded an adjustment that was far from easy for a 10-year-old boy who had just lost his father.

The English have no imagination: and yet they do show imagination in two things - two only. In the evening-clothes worn by old ladies, and in their cafés.

I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.

- L, did you know we’re reenacting the Salem witch trials in English tomorrow? - Haven’t been memorizing your case file? Do you even look in your backpack anymore? - Did you know my dad is videotaping it? I do. Because I walked in on his lunch date with Mrs. English. - Ewww. - What should we do? - I guess we should start calling her Ms. English? - Not funny, L.

The English will agree with me that there are plenty of good things for the table in America; but the old proverb says: 'God sends meat and the devil sends cooks.'

I believe it is essential to have English as the official language of our National Government, for the English language is the tie that binds the millions of immigrants who come to America from divergent backgrounds. We should, and do, encourage immigrants to maintain and share their traditions, customs and religions, but the use of English is essential for immigrants and their children to participate fully in American society and achieve the American dream.

In Korean, my lyrics are witty and have twists. But translated into English, it doesn't come over. I've tried writing in English, just for me, but it doesn't work. I've got to know everything about a culture, and I don't.

Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways.

English fans and the English atmospheres are special.

Speaking fluent English - like doing long division or successfully rewiring a 220-volt electrical outlet - is not a skill you're born with. It's something you learn, occasionally even by opening some old dictionary.

A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.

The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.

I understood that without English I would never get far, so my dream was to become a receptionist, and so I started to learn English from watching 'Sesame Street.'

English is much drier. You can get away with a lot less. Pathos, lyricism, these are things you have to tone down if you want the English version of the book to work.

And I think because of the passion of every English player and every English supporter, and every English journalist for the game, most of the game is played with passion, love for football and instinct, but in football you also have to think.

I've loved 'Vanity Fair' since I was 16 years old. You know, we're all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.

I always wanted to do my solo album in English, because I grew up listening to a lot of pop artists and English-based songs.

Having managed in Holland, Spain, and Germany, I had always hoped for the opportunity to manage in English football and be part of English culture.

I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

I think the English are bipolar. 'We're the greatest, no we're terrible' - that's a constant English struggle. Crime is down, there's little poverty - yet it's always the worst time to have lived here.

I grew up speaking Vietnamese - that was my first language because my parents didn't speak any English, and I didn't learn English until I started school.

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass

English people are always surprised I'm English.

I'd always been the confident guy in school. I was good in math and English, but I was still shy. I couldn't get up and speak in front of people. I was asked to do it when I was 10 years old and I burst out crying.

My family fled the Soviet Union when I was three and a half years old. Upon arriving in New York City in 1979, my father worked multiple jobs to support us, all the while learning English at night.

My English is actually getting worse. We talk Spanish at home and switch to English only when we need it. Like when we go to the bank to get some money.

I am sure that the two main forms of English, American English and British English, separated geographically from the beginning and severed politically since 1776, are continuing to move apart, and that existing elements of linguistic dissimilarity between them will intensify as time goes on, notwithstanding the power of the cinema, TV, Time Magazine, and other two-way gluing and fuelling devices.

Apparently the Dutch now prided themselves on being better at queues than the English, which was absurd, because standing cheerfully in line was the English national sport.

The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.

I knew at five years old what I wanted to do for a living. I started reading newspapers and books out loud at a very young age. I was very focused on English and building my vocabulary.

Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

I have a wonderful English-language dialogue coach. All the time I have to speak English, he is with me. It is a double effort, because you have to say the words correctly and then act them.

I will for ever, at all hazards, assert the dignity, independence, and integrity of the English bar; without which, impartial justice, the most valuable part of the English constitution, can have no existence.

Doubt is an old disease. Faith is an old medicine. Compassion is an old doctor. Concern is an old nurse.

I learned English kind of late. I remember when I got my first opportunity to work in America, I didn't speak a lot of English, so I only really knew my lines for the movie I was doing.

Some may argue that countries like Japan and China improved economically without English, but they, too, are learning English fast.

So many of the bands that influenced me growing up were English, even if I didn't realise it. English pop ruled the world in the '80s!

I wouldn't have any fears about coming to England because I have played against English sides in the Champions League and studied the English game.

Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.

I grew up on a council estate in Luton, and as a child, I was very much into the brass-band tradition. I was basically a Salvation Army boy. My English granddad bought me a cornet when I was five years old.

I have some English words on the first album, but any time I try to do it, you miss something. You think it's just a simple translation from French to English, but it's so different as far as the understanding.

I grew up speaking Korean, but my dad spoke English very well. I learned a lot of how to speak English by watching television.

Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman, the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.

My father and mother emigrated to Canada in 1958, but there's nobody more English than an Englishman who no longer lives in England, and our home was a shrine to all things English.

People learn English from 'Full House.' Candace's husband, Valeri Bure, he learned to speak English watching it... 'Aw, nuts.' 'You got it, dude.'

I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.

Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works.

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.

English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place.

The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to know it in any reputable sense of the word - let alone your learning to write English - is, in short, impossible.

So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.

It was an old, old, old, old lady, And a boy who was half-past three; And the way they played together Was beautiful to see.