#english

Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language. ↗

— Jonathan Ames

#humor #humor

Funny,’ Will said, as they picked their way through. ‘Things are absolutely awful and yet people look much happier than usual. Look at them all. Bubbling.’ ‘They are English,’ Merriman said. ‘Quite right,’ said Will’s father. ‘Splendid in adversity, tedious when safe. Never content, in fact. We’re an odd lot…. ↗

— Susan Cooper

#humour #the-dark-is-rising #truism #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

lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays… ↗

— Stephen Fry

#humour #pretentiousness #university #music

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

Fraud, robbery, and murder have characterized the English usurpation of the government of our country. Why, for the last fifty years we have been robbed in the matter of taxes of hundreds of millions. ↗

— John Edward Redmond

#characterized #country #english #fifty #fraud

Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life. ↗

— Cecil Rhodes

#englishman #first #life #lottery #prize

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert. ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

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

I was sent to a school with bosses for teachers- no Twain, only cane; check your dick you harry, no Dickens either, No Tom Sawyers no David Copperfields only Webster, master it for grammar, the Wren with a dash of Martini-Drink deep. ↗

— Aporva Kala

#school #youth #love