Top 1200 Plain English Quotes & Sayings - Page 19

I prefer the plain and simple sentences: the ones that you don't notice because you're so interested in what's happening to the people and events that the sentences are creating.

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

I was in love when I was in college; we all were. I remember how beautiful everybody was. Even the plain people looked beautiful.

For an artist to go and play in a country that occupies other people's land and oppresses them, the way Israel does, is plain wrong. They should say no.

Lie down among the pines for a while, then get to plain pure white love-work ... to help humanity and other mortals and the Lord.

High School is like a spork: it's a crappy spoon and a crappy fork, so in the end it's just plain useless.

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

A friend cannot be owned That is plain to see Friendships must be shared, Just like our friend, Ruby

I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so... We're beginning to have Spanish move in on English in the states because of all the people coming from Hispanic countries... and we're beginning to learn some Spanish. And I think that's a good thing... Only having one language is very limiting... You get to think that's the way the human race is made; there's only one language worth speaking... Well, this isn't good for English.

A traveller, lost on a desert plain, feels that the recognition of one star, the Pole star, is of itself a great acquisition.

No one is a plain white room. I hate going into a home that is done to the nines but has nothing do with the homeowner - no knickknacks, no art that has anything to say about the person who lives there.

Logically, when you talkin' about folk music and blues, you find out it's music of just plain people.

The rap on Obama has been that he is a little too cool and aloof. The rap on Romney may be that he is just plain callous.

I'm gonna be blunt and plain, if one ever looks at me like that I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died.

Trump eventually slurs anyone who inconveniences him, and the plain, measurable fact is that a large majority of Jewish American voters continue to vote Democrat.

Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

One of the things I love about translation is it obliterates the self. When I'm trying to figure out what Tu Fu has to say, I have to kind of impersonate Tu Fu. I have to take on, if you will, his voice and his skin in English, and I have to try to get as deeply into the poem as possible. I'm not trying to make an equivalent poem in English, which can't be done because our language can't accommodate the kind of metaphors within metaphors the Chinese written language can, and often does, contain.

The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

It may just be because I get homesick, but I have concluded Washington's cherry blossoms are just plain overrated.

The undisturbed coastal plain is home to a wide variety of plants and animals and is the only wilderness sanctuary in North America that protects a complete range of the arctic ecosystem.

Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.

Lucy took a single plain donut from the bag and held it for me to take a bite. Tender and light and still warm from the frying. Not too sugary.

For the most part, I think of PC as meaning Plain Civil. You treat people the way you'd like to be treated yourself, and that means not using language that is demeaning.

Few provisions of the Constitution are more plain than Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7: 'No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.'

I am a woman, I am a minority person, and I speak in a very plain way. And I think that reaches people.

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

The most dangerous and successful conspiracies take place in public, in plain sight, under the clear, bright light of day -- usually with TV cameras focused on them.

Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.

To see the Persia of poets and painters, hiding in plain sight behind the much-maligned Iran of our newspaper headlines, would be my fondest wish.

Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.

In England everything is liberalised. Within certain boundaries and rules everybody can do what he likes. Maybe London's society has a different tempo, a different dynamic. London is fast, productive, creative but it is not England. If you want to transfer that to football, you could say: in the four big English clubs and maybe in the one or two behind them there is a top level. Everything that comes after that rather mirrors English society. It's honest, fair and hard, sometimes also fast, but not always so perfect.

I like the music. I love it & live it in fact. But for me the business part of music just plain stinks.

On the stone that remains carved next to his name, his epitaph plain, only a pawn in their game.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules.

I've always been a fan of plain writing. I hate metaphor-laden, heavily larded, lyrical writing.

She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.

As it is, plain reasoning assures me I am not indispensable to the universe: but with this reasoning, somehow, does not travel my belief.

The only reason anything was off-white at the Chateau was because it had once been just plain white.

I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

The absolutist trumpets his plain vision; the relativist sees only someone who is unaware of his own spectacles.

There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

Your past forms you, whether you like it or not. Each encounter and experience has its own effect, and you're shaped the way the wind shapes a mesquite tree on a plain.

It truly amazes me all the things you can add and mix in to truly transform a plain old bowl of oatmeal.

Burns from dropped matches, Ms. Lane? Matches one might have dropped while flirting with a pernicious Fae, Ms. Lane? Have you any idea the value of this rug?” I didn’t think his nostrils could flare any wider. His eyes were black flame. “Pernicious? Good grief, is English your second language? Third?” Only someone who’d learned English from a dictionary would use such a word. “Fifth,” he snarled. “Answer me.

A large part of me is pure nebbish - plain, dull, uninteresting. There's a more flamboyant part, too. Obviously.

It might sound unconvincing when an actor like me who has done 500 films says that television is more competitive than movies, but that is the plain truth.

When awful darkness and silence reign Over the great Gromboolian plain, Through the long, long wintry nights.

Trust the comfy clothes you reach for day after day, your plain, regular, essential self.

People invade your space and offend your sensibilities because, to be plain, they couldn't care less about you.

I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.

Creepy is better than just plain scary because you can't look away from creepy - you want to know the truth!

Most days I struggle just to be accepted into the camp of plain old feminists. This is mainly because I am not by nature ideological and generally suspicious of people who are.

America has this understanding of Africans that plays like National Geographic: a bunch of Negroes with loincloths running around the plain fields of Africa chasing gazelles.

In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two works, industry and frugality.

Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.