Quotes & Sayings About Cantonese

There are a lot of colloquialisms in the Cantonese language that can never be represented aptly in Mandarin. — Jia Zhangke

I think the best life would be one that's lived off the grid. No bills, your name in no government databases. No real proof you're even who you say you are, aside from, you know, being who you say you are. I don't mean living in a mountain hut with solar power and drinking well water. I think nature's beautiful and all, but I don't have any desire to live in it. I need to live in a city. I need pay as you go cell phones in fake names, wireless access stolen or borrowed from coffee shops and people using old or no encryption on their home networks. Taking knife fighting classes on the weekend! Learning Cantonese and Hindi and how to pick locks. Getting all sorts of skills so that when your mind starts going, and you're a crazy raving bum, at least you're picking their pockets while raving in a foreign language at smug college kids on the street. At least you're always gonna be able to eat. — Joey Comeau

I'm about to start working with a singer I met on my last trip: she'll get international exposure, and I'll have a song out in that market sung in Cantonese. — Paul Oakenfold

Cantonese will eat anything in the sky but airplanes, anything in the sea but submarines, and anything with four legs but the table. — Amanda Bennett

Lebanese mezze, Cantonese dim sum and Basque pinchos have all evolved over years and are designed to make sense together. — Yotam Ottolenghi

I was born in Scotland and have lived there all my life. I speak conversational Cantonese with my dad when I'm at home, and very basic Mandarin. — Katie Leung

My parents are European immigrants. And I think as Europeans there are so many languages in close proximity that it's part of the culture to try to learn at least one other language. So my parents really encourage it in the house. Chinese would be really great to learn - like Mandarin or Cantonese. Portuguese would be incredible. — Stana Katic

Lash had been explaining to her that it's impolite to refer to an African American as a nigga, unless one was another African American, when Troy Lee came in and said, "She only speaks Cantonese."
"She does not. She keeps coming in and saying 'What's up my nigga?'"
"Oh yeah. She does that to me, too. Did you give her a pound?"
"No. I didn't give her a pound, motherfucker. She called me a nigga."
"Well, she's not going to quit unless you give her a pound. It's just the way she rolls."
"That's some bullshit, Troy."
"It's her couch. — Christopher Moore

On the third play he dropped back to pass, and it was unadulterated chaos: The pocket was immediately collapsing, people were yelling, everything was happening at the same time, and it felt like he was trying to defuse a pipe bomb while learning to speak Cantonese."
"He believed it was his destiny to kill faceless foreigners for complex reasons that were beyond his control, and to deeply question the meaning of those murders, and to kill despite those questions, and to eventually understand the meaning of his own life through the battlefield executions of total strangers."
"Teaching history to eighth graders is like being a tour guide for people who hate their vacation."
"There is no feeling that can match the emotive intensity of an attraction devoid of explanation. — Chuck Klosterman

Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese. — David Tang

For Cantonese - because there's no standardized pinyin system - I have to have someone read it to me, and then I rewrite the whole script in my own Cantonese pinyin. — Daniel Wu

I matched my heated tone with one of pure ice. "I believe I did attempt to relate to you the facts of my calls and you interrupted me with a rather magnificent display of temper much as you are doing now. If you do not have all the facts of the case perhaps you have no one but yourself to blame." Brisbane opened his mouth and shut it with a snap. His mouth remained closed but I could hear him muttering under his breath. "What are you saying?" "I am counting. To one hundred. In Cantonese. — Deanna Raybourn

Sundays are for Dim Sum. While the rest of America goes to church, Sunday School, or NFL games, you can find Chinese people eating Cantonese food. — Eddie Huang

If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it. — Prince Philip

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. — Leslie Feinberg

I speak Cantonese, and I speak Tagalog. — Reggie Lee

There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and these were not his people.
Those were not his dumplings. — Cory Doctorow