#english

The typical English painting is narrative in character. The English are a nation of diarists. ↗

— Neville Weston

#englishmen #art

So she did the English thing. She changed the subject. ↗

— Steve Hockensmith

#english #subject #change

I am now in Gibraltar. It is a large place and there does not seem to be room in this letter, in which to express my feelings about Moors in bare legs and six thousand Red-coats and to hear Englishmen speak again. ↗

— Richard H. Davis

#again #am #bare #does #englishmen

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English. ↗

— Aravind Adiga

#communication #english #language #communication

You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,” said Miss Pross, in her breathing. “Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#devil #englishmen #englishwomen #lucifer #match

This was in [Orwell's] 1946 'Politics and the English Language,' an essay that despite its date (and its title's basic redundancy) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell's famous AE translation of the gorgeous 'I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift' in Ecclesiastes as 'Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account' should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the anglophone world. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#writing #dating

I thought again how odd it was to be on formal terms with someone you had once permitted to lick your ears. ↗

— Josh Lanyon

#death

It's like there are all these languages available, especially in terms of image. Why confine yourself to only English? There's all these languages and possibilities and concepts to speak or communicate with. ↗

— William Wiley

#available #communicate #concepts #confine #english

See! He likes you,” Natalie said triumphantly. I stared down at the scrawny scrap of fur cautiously sniffing my hand. “He doesn’t like me. He thinks I’m going to feed him.” “Now who’s being a cynic? Anyway, every bookstore should have a cat.” The cat -- assuming it was a cat and not some beige bug-eyed refugee from outer space -- slunk uneasily down the counter, and flinched at the flutter of Mystery Scene pages as a gust of warm air blew in from the street. ↗

— Josh Lanyon

#death

Emma sat up very straight in the saddle. Her eyes were huge, but she said bravely, “I could do it!” “I know you can.” “I wasn’t afraid.” “There’s nothing wrong with being afraid,” I told her. “It’s how you handle it. ↗

— Josh Lanyon

#death