#english

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, I never indulge in poetics - Unless I am down with rheumatics. ↗

— Quintus Ennius

#down #english #friend #i #i am

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

— Neville Weston

#englishmen #art

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. ↗

— Henry James

#english #literature #summer #beauty

I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#described #english #heard #i #i think

Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour' 'Well, it's bloody close...' 'Well, they often are.... ↗

— Alan Hollinghurst

#forbidden-fruit #french #sin #beauty

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

— Steve Hockensmith

#english #subject #change

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’ve been telling you that you should hire Warren.” “Nat, I’m not going to hire Warren.” “Why not?” I opened my mouth to tell her exactly why not, but as I stared at her too-bright blue eyes and the way her chin was quivering, I chickened out. “Because…because I promised Angus when he left that he could have his job back.” “Adrien, he was involved in a murder.” “But he was very good at alphabetizing. ↗

— Josh Lanyon

#death

I have not been nourished by English Literature. . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer... I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ‘mad’. . . but I don’t believe I am... [I] set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#epic #greek #homer #myth #design

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs ↗

— Stephen Fry

#education