#english

In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America. ↗

— Gael Garcia Bernal

#around #bit #end #english #favor

We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra. ↗

— William Kingdon Clifford

#always #bad #cannot #common #common sense

You don't believe it because you don't understand," he said hoarsely. "Prosper was different. He wasn't like other people. He might have hated me, but he loved me too. In his own way. He couldn't help it; not after raising me for all those years." When no one responded – when he saw nothing but expressions of disbelief on the faces around him – Cadel wailed, "He did! He did! I know he did! He only wanted to wreck my life because he wasn't a part of it!" And as sympathetic hands reached out towards him from every corner of the car, Cadel began to cry like someone whose heart was breaking. ↗

— Catherine Jinks

#prosper-english #life

-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover? I said nothing. -Deny it,damn you! ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

#love #michael-ondaatje #novel #romance #the-english-patient

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge. ↗

— Douglas Coupland

#grammar #language #syntax #words #grammar

When learning English as a second language, be sure to garble small words out of order in incomplete sentences. Then you'll have achieved the proficiency of a native speaker. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #grammar #humor #funny

I'm English. We're about as tactful as a hot poker up the bum, most of the time. ↗

— L.H. Thomson

#funny #giggles #humor #funny

The hallway was lined with numbered doors, odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other, and large ornamental vases, too large to hold flowers and too small to hold spies. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#humor #humor

Her back to me, she said, “I know what Paul thinks. Everyone thinks I didn’t love Porter, that I just married him for the money, but Porter and I --” She shrugged. As avowals of lasting love go, I’ve sat through more professional presentations. But I said, “No outsider can understand a relationship between two people.” Hell, sometimes even the people in the relationship couldn’t understand it. ↗

— Josh Lanyon

#death

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself. ↗

— Peter Ackroyd

#literature #music #imagination