English proverbs

Page 4

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

- Jonathan Ames98

◆ He that climbs the tall tree has won right to the fruit, He that leaps the wide gulf should prevail in his suit.

- Walter Scott98

◆ My birthday is coming up. I was born on March 5th, 1982. Humans have come a long way since then—nearly 30 years, if my math is good. And my math better be good, because if my math's no good, what's that leave? I mean aside from English, art, science, social studies, history, geography, P.E., recess, and of course, lunch.?

- Jarod Kintz98

◆ Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.

- John Patrick Lowrie98

◆ some trillions of years ago a sloppy, dirty giant flicked grease from his fingers. One of those gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor. Splat!

- Brion Gysin98

◆ The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

- James D. Nicoll98

◆ I beg your pardon; I am drunk without a drink. English wine & words are vulnerable to every man.

- Santosh Kalwar98

◆ He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.

- J.M. Coetzee98

◆ To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

- Jack Lynch98

◆ It's not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only a relationship, but this special relationship between two things of different kinds....In sum, all the seemingly complicated kinds of modification in English are just ways of thinking and seeing how things go with each other or reflect each other. Modifiers in our language are not aids to understanding relationships; they are the ways to understand relationships. A mistake in this matter either comes from or causes a clouded mind. Usually it's both.

- Richard Mitchell98

◆ Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce.

- Christopher Hitchens98

◆ I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.

- Anne Rice98

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

- L.H. Thomson98

◆ ...I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.

- Linus Pauling98

◆ The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

- Chinua Achebe98