English Quotes

In the first English class I attended, Prof. E. H. Elliot, addressing me, asked if I really belonged to the Junior B. A. class, and I had to answer him in the affirmative. He then proceeded to inquire how old I was.

Gore speaks to America as if English is its second language; George W. speaks as if English is his second language.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.

The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.

I read good. I was an English major.

Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Giving English to an American is like giving sex to a child.

We struggled with it at Newcastle and we were not alone in that among the English clubs.