523 Quotes About English

  • Author J.M. Coetzee
  • Quote

    As you speak I swear I can hear words being selected, one after another, from the word-box you carry around with you, and slotted into place. That is not how a true native speak, one who is born into a language.’‘How does a native speak?’‘From the heart. Words well up within and he sings them, sings along with them. So to speak.

  • Tags
  • Share


  • Author Jean Rhys
  • Quote

    I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and snow.

  • Tags
  • Share



  • Author Anne Carson
  • Quote

    In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Thomas De Quincey
  • Quote

    Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent drapery” which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them; accordingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Jean Rhys
  • Quote

    Better not I tell you. You want to know what I do? I say doudou, if you have trouble you are right to come to me. And I kiss her. It's when I kiss her she cry - not before.

  • Tags
  • Share