Bilingual Quotes & Sayings

The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator. — Alma Guillermoprieto

I grew up in a community that was bilingual. I've done it for a while, singing in both languages. — Jon Secada

My films have become bilingual. When everyone saw 'Chennai Express,' they said it was a bilingual. But I am proud that 'Chennai Express' is the highest-grossing Hindi film down South. — Rohit Shetty

I'm bilingual. I speak English and I speak educationese. — Shirley Hufstedler

You'd never be able to convince someone to give you money to do a bilingual story where you're not translating half of it - you'd drive people crazy. But in comics, you can do whatever your heart desires. — Brian K. Vaughan

The latter. She had a good run, Sook said, doing a little shrug. It was his usual response to death at Mapleshade, and it was a safe bet that he felt that way about himself. Like most twice-widowed, Korea-vet, nature-loving, gun-enthusiast, bilingual, weed-connoisseur great grandfathers of five, he'd lived a full life. — Lisa Lutz

I find attempts to create bilingual gospels laughable, in particular the attempt to translate the service from Church Slavonic into Russian. What for? In order not to make the effort and not to learn the divine, if somewhat artificial but solemn, language specially carved for this purpose? This language also provides a link with a tradition which is realized at depths and which the modern Russian language cannot plumb. — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

I failed world geography, civics, Spanish and English. And when you fail Spanish and English, they do not consider you bilingual. They may call you bi-ignorant because you can't speak any language. — Tim Scott

All conservatives are bilingual we have to be. We speak both liberal and conservative. But liberals are monolingual - they don't have to be anything else. They speak liberal, and are completely ignorant of the conservative tongue. — John Podhoretz

My goal was to reach this literary crowd, but I didn't want to alienate my core fan base. I grew up speaking that language, this isn't put on. I can go back and forth; it's almost like being bilingual. But I'm not college educated; I don't know rules of grammar. — Rude Jude

In the '80s, I thought I'd be a success as a woman if I were the president of a billion dollar company, had a sensitive soul-mate husband, two bilingual children, buns of steels, and a compost heap. In the '90s, I pretty much feel I'm a success if I can get through the afternoon without eating a cheesecake. — Cathy Guisewite

An indigenous culture with sufficient territory, and bilingual and intercultural education, is in a better position to maintain and cultivate its mythology and shamanism. Conversely, the confiscation of their lands and imposition of foreign education, which turns their young people into amnesiacs, threatens the survival not only of these people, but of an entire way of knowing. It is as if one were burning down the oldest universities in the world and their libraries, one after another - thereby sacrificing the knowledge of the world's future generations. — Jeremy Narby

Sarah Buckley is precious, because she is bilingual. She can speak the language of a mother who gave birth to her four children at home. She can also speak like a medical doctor. By intermingling the language of the heart and the scientific language she is driving the history of childbirth towards a radical and inspiring new direction. — Michel Odent

Serial tasking is hard because switching tasks is hard, even when the tasks are easy and similar. In some experiments, bilingual speakers are asked to read out numbers, first in one language and then midway in another language. They often stumble at the switch, taking many tries before they hit their stride again. — Sendhil Mullainathan

If you speak three languages you're trilingual. If you speak two languages you're bilingual. If you speak the language of the opposite sex, you can communicate. — Julieanne O'Connor

My parents are both Belgian-born, and so am I, actually. I'm bilingual, so I had experience with French. — Celine Buckens

I wish I could say he was a French professor, a French chef, or even a bilingual tutor, but I can't. He worked in a factory and spent his summer evenings at a reenactment village as a blacksmith or something equally masculine. But it didn't really matter. He was the kind of man I had dreamt of, one who could bring a touch of the exotic to my small-town existence. (No doubt he would make love as passionately as he spoke French.) — Chila Woychik

Make no mistake. Canada is not a bilingual country. In fact it is less bilingual today than it has ever been. — Stephen Harper

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it's almost like a meeting. — Franz Kafka

American professional athletes are bilingual; they speak English and profanity. — Gordie Howe

Anecdotally his fitness reports rated him well above average in the classroom, excellent in the field, fluently bilingual in English and French, passable in Spanish, outstanding on all man-portable weaponry, and beyond outstanding at hand-to-hand combat. Susan knew what that last rating meant. Like having a running chainsaw thrown at you — Lee Child

History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. — Richard Lamm

It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual. — Jacques Barzun

That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are. — Henry Louis Gates

Well, my first languages are German and Spanish because I was brought up by a Spanish mother and a German father, so I always spoke both languages at home. I'm very thankful that I was brought up in a bilingual house. — Daniel Bruhl

A bilingual marriage, by the way, is a great way to stay together for longer than you normally would because you can't understand each other very well. — Poe Ballantine

Her English was sweet, an effort for her, anachronistic and unpractised. — Ruth Ahmed

I was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school. — Laurence Yep

My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers. — David Henry Hwang

If you do not learn English in this country, you cannot get anywhere. We are in America. We are not in Mexico, we are not in China, we are not in Saudi Arabia - we speak English in this country! And what bilingual education does, is keep them from learning English, so they are doomed to be second-class citizens. — Rafael Cruz

Being bilingual is like having a wife and a mistress. One can never be sure of either. — Natalie Clifford Barney

For years, "Sorry, I don't speak French" has been the reflexive response of English-speaking Canadians to a request, a comment, or a greeting in the other official language. Part apology, part defiance, it is a declaration of the otherness. That is not me. I don't do that. The language barrier is her, at this counter, now. — Graham Fraser

I don't know or understand any other language except the language of kindness. — Debasish Mridha

Something critical happens when the cadre of bilinguals learns to read imported scrolls: they gain entry into a library. I use the word "library" to refer not to a physical building but, more broadly, to the collectivity of accumulated writings. . . . humans possess an ever-increasing store of writings, the totality of which I call the library. The transformation of an oral culture into a written one means, first and foremost, the potential entry of bilinguals into a library. — Minae Mizumura

Can you imagine being bilingual? Or even knowing anybody that was? I'm not even unilingual. Actually, I shouldn't say that. I don't give myself enough credit. I know enough English to, you know, get by. I can order in restaurants and stuff. — Brian Regan

Bilingual-education advocates say it's important to teach a child in his or her family's language. I say you can't use family language in the classroom - the very nature of the classroom requires that you use language publicly. — Richard Rodriguez

The guru, if he is gifted, reads the story as any bilingual person might. He does not translate-he understands. — Bill Vaughan

My father was the son of immigrants, and he grew up bilingual, but English is what my father taught me and what he spoke to me. America's strength is not our diversity; it is our ability to unite around common principles even when we come from different backgrounds. — Ernest Istook

Annoyance has made me bilingual. — Gayle Forman

All hockey players are bilingual. They know English and profanity. — Gordie Howe

If educators were really understanding of that, they'd say, "You know what? Forget about bilingual, we're going to do multilingual education." So children are ready for the new millennium. We're way behind compared to countries in Europe. If we were multilingual, imagine how much you would learn about your own culture, about the sensibilities of what's important in your own culture. — Sandra Cisneros

When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual. — Pat Mora

I've studied Chinese in college, but basically, I'm not bilingual. — David Henry Hwang

It seems obvious now: the child who spends school days in a fog of semi-comprehension has no way to know her problem is not that she is slow-witted. — Sonia Sotomayor

It's a complicated process being so bilingual. Sometimes it's a mere word or sentence that comes to me, if I'm writing the book in English, in French. It's not always easy to deal with. Sometimes even during an interview somebody can ask me a question in English that I want to answer in French and vice versa - that's the story of my life! — Tatiana De Rosnay

By the time they got home, they were both thoroughly bilingual in cursing. * — Orson Scott Card

I was brought up bilingual, but there came a point where my mom went back to work and I got a white babysitter, so sadly I lost it. Now I can understand Spanish and put words together, but I don't speak it fluently. I'm ashamed of that. — Michael Trevino

Among the disciples of Jesus, it seems most likely that at least Philip was bilingual in Aramaic and Greek. — Jay Parini

An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness. — Sonia Sotomayor

Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and write Chinese, but they did not go to a Chinese school, and they act and think differently from us. Drawing a line between us, they would never say they graduated from a Chinese school, because former Chinese school graduates, that is, the vanishing group of people that includes us, are second-class citizens. They, on the other hand, belong to the first class, the Chinese elite, English school graduates who are fluent in Chinese. — Yeng Pway Ngon

[Doing a bilingual album] helped artistically because whenever I got bored of writing in English, I would write in Spanish. It's always cool when you have the choice. — Enrique Iglesias

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms. — John Millington Synge

As an individual, and I have to say as a person of color, the thing about being an 'other' in America is I really feel like you're bilingual. I'm from a small town in Wisconsin, but even when I'm in New York and I'm working for MSNBC or CNN, you're used to being the only black person in the room. — John Ridley

Given the clientele, the restaurants on Capri might resemble those fancy Northern Italian places on the East Side of Manhattan where the captain has taken bilingual sneering lessons from the maitre d' at the French joint down the street and the waiter, whose father was born in Palermo, would deny under torture that tomato sauce has ever touched his lips. — Calvin Trillin

I think I'm representing a new generation of Latinos - bilingual, bicultural people. — Genesis Rodriguez

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual. — Helen Vendler

And although like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I'm bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages, I understood the gist of the message. — Paul Beatty

He speaks English, Spanish, and he's bilingual too. — Don King

You know, even growing up going to school, I had teachers that were against bilingual teaching. I never understood that. My parents always had me speak Spanish first knowing I was going to speak English in school. — Emily Rios

Most educated Indians are bilingual. Amongst the urban elite though, there is a disdain for regional languages. That's unfortunate. — Amish Tripathi

My wife and I have spent most of our lives in France, and we are both pretty well bilingual, my wife more purely than I, since as a little girl she went to school in French Switzerland. — Patrick O'Brian

We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto. — Newt Gingrich

No camera, no recording device, no laptop, none of this palm pilot nonsense or a cell phone. Paper and pencil, a book, maybe a bilingual dictionary. Anything beyond that (a) can be stolen, and (b) intimidates people you encounter. The more double-A batteries you carry, the more you distance yourself from the people you're writing about. — Tom Miller

I have 5 children of my own. They are bilingual, like most second and third generations. But they speak primarily in English and they couldn't find anything on television that represented who they are in this country. — Robert Rodriguez

I came here when I was almost 22. I'm perfectly bilingual, but I'm never going to sound like Sandra Bullock. — Roselyn Sanchez

Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak 'job interview.' — Dave Chappelle