Confusing English Quotes & Sayings

It's a god-eat-god world" - katya — Katya Mills

In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English? — Marlene Dietrich

But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too. — Madeleine L'Engle

It was never about winning medals or being famous. — Nancy Kerrigan

Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope,
And God Save
as you prefer
the King or Ireland.
The land of scholars and saints:
Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,
Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints — Louis MacNeice

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common. — Bill Bryson

The exciting thing about doing art for someone else's story is how I can translate their world through pictures, and that's always a pretty big challenge. — Tony DiTerlizzi

I'd always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't. — Roy Lichtenstein

What police officer would dare ticket Death's minivan? — Augusten Burroughs

Love is the most important word in the English language
and the most confusing. — Gary Chapman

Sharks are like ax-murderers, Martin. People react to them with their guts. There's something crazy and evil and uncontrollable about them. — Peter Benchley

Nothing but your choices define your true intelligence. — Debasish Mridha

I think judgment is from within. It's not a God judging. Someone who is nasty - they're the one who has to sleep at night. — Jane Siberry

I've often been the guy who doesn't get the girl. — Hugh Bonneville

Objections to verbification in English tend to be motivated by personal taste, not clarity. Verbed words are usually easily understood. When a word like 'friend' is declared not a verb, the problem isn't that it's confusing; it's that the protester finds it deeply annoying. — Erin McKean

Whatever the culture, there's a tongue in our head. Some use it, some hold it, some bite it. For the French it is a rapier, thrusting in attack; the English, using it defensively, mumble a vague, confusing reply; for Italians and Spaniards it is an instrument of eloquence; Finns and East Asians throw you with constructive silence. Silence is a form of speech, so don't interrupt it! — Richard D. Lewis

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two. — Ian McEwan

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are ... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition. — Paul Feyerabend

I want a nice picture book with 12 pictures - I do my best with that format. — Dick Bruna