#english

i learn how to love i learn how to cry but i will never learn how to say goodbye ↗

— lowell mag-asin

#love

It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger – how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your soul. ↗

— Paul Hoffman

#cale #destruction #easier #easy #english-quote

We are men without ambition, and all we want is to be left alone, in peace so that we can try and be happy. So few people will understand this simplicity. ↗

— Upamanyu Chatterjee

#english #men

Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers. ↗

— James Kelman

#crises #emotional #english-literature #fortune #money

The most self-damaging words in the English language are: try, might, and if. These are words of uncertainty. Will you fail? That is possible. But continue doubting your abilities and you’ll never succeed. ↗

— Dannika Dark

#ability #confidence #damaged #damaging #doubt

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language. ↗

— Jared Diamond

#music

Nature pulls one way and human nature another. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#english-lit #gay-authors #nature

I guess that isn't the right word," she said. She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that. This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#love

Suddenly I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get. I was really scared. I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk. For three days, I couldn't answer the phone. ↗

— F. Murray Abraham

#answer #days #english #english language #every

Your great country is wonderful at stealing pieces of history and using it for its own purposes, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it but the English were incredibly exercised about it. ↗

— Michael Apted

#anything #country #english #exercised #great