English For Kids Quotes & Sayings

When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish. I thought little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it. — Mel Brooks

When I'm in town on Sundays, I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town. — Joe Scarborough

I learned English by watching soaps as a kid, and since I don't have any formal education and can't teach at the universities like other literary writers do. — Kola Boof

English kings married their cousins and so their kids were as sharp as clubs. — Peter Prasad

I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet. — Langston Hughes

I grew up speaking English and Spanish. I grew up moving from country to country due to political, governmental, and social issues and just family atmosphere that wasn't right to bring up your kid in a country where there's a dictatorship or a communist type sense, so I incorporate that int music. — Cristian Machado

My children used to occasionally ask me to proofread English papers for them. The difficulty, for me, was in just proofreading. I could see all kinds of ways they could make the paper better. But I didn't volunteer my ideas, because I was afraid that then they would lose the self-confidence and sense of accomplishment they had gotten from writing the paper. Better to let their teacher make the suggestions, if she was so inclined, since kids expect English teachers to make suggestions. You need to keep your long-term goals firmly in mind. Children who are enthusiastic about working will, sooner or later, do much better work than kids who just grind out assignments because someone is standing over them. — Mary Leonhardt

In the NBA you need a little bit more than that when Jordan is front of you. You need a little bit more than that when it is Barkley or Karl Malone or Shaq or whoever else. You need a lot more than that frankly if you're the English kid who can't jump. — John Amaechi

Maybe because I began as a writer, I have a good ear for dialogue, and maybe being an English major - and that I also read a lot as a kid - if I hear somebody say something that I think's funny, or I find a situation or story, I'll try to work that into the movie. — Owen Wilson

My first audition happened to be for 'Kindergarten Cop,' and I took that role. I was only starting to learn English at that point. Spanish is my first language, so they made me a speaking character in the movie. I didn't really know I was shooting a movie. I was just having a lot of fun with 30 kids my own age. — Odette Annable

People forget that there are villages and communities that are still speaking French all over Canada. I went to a bar and spoke with some French people there, and they were saying: 'I went to English school, but at home it was always French, and that's going to be the way it is for my kids.' It's important for them to keep that language alive. — Marc-Andre Grondin

A truly enlightened attitude to language should simply be to let six thousand or more flowers bloom. Subcultures should be allowed to thrive, not just because it is wrong to squash them, because they enrich the wider culture. Just as Black English has left its mark on standard English Culture, South Africans take pride in the marks of Afrikaans and African languages on their vocabulary and syntax.
New Zealand's rugby team chants in Maori, dancing a traditional dance, before matches. French kids flirt with rebellion by using verlan, a slang that reverses words' sounds or syllables (so femmes becomes meuf). Argentines glory in lunfardo, an argot developed from the underworld a centyry ago that makes Argentine Spanish unique still today. The nonstandard greeting "Where y'at?" for "How are you?" is so common among certain whites in New Orleans that they bear their difference with pride, calling themselves Yats. And that's how it should be. — Robert Lane Greene

Everybody thinks that you go to Africa and you build a school, or you teach English, or you build a hospital. But actually all you need to do is play football with kids for six months and then after they've trusted you, you tell them about the truth of Aids, and that their grandmother didn't die from witchcraft, she died from Aids. And that's the biggest difference you can make. — Tom Hiddleston

I wish I could adjust my voice, but it's just what's happened to me. It's because I've lived abroad for a long time, and my wife is English and my kids all have English accents, and every voice I hear is English. I've never intentionally changed my accent at all. — Bill Bryson

I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating. — Miyavi

I have always been English, ever since I emigrated from England and since the kids in Canada beat me up at the age of twelve for having an East London Cockney accent. I thank them for the cockney taunts because the beatings turned me on to boxing. But on a serious note Canada has been kind to me. — Lennox Lewis

I would read the Shel Silverstein poems, Dr. Seuss, and I noticed early on that poetry was something that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try to think of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other kids were like, "Oh, man. We have to write poems again?" and I would have a three-page long poem. I won a national poetry contest when I was in fourth grade for a poem called "Monster In My Closet. — Taylor Swift

Kids deserve arts, and it's just as important as science, math, history, English or athletics. — Flea

Any day you had gym class was a weird school day. It started off normal. You had English, Social Studies, Geometry, then suddenly your in Lord of the Flies for 40 minutes. Your hanging from a rope, you have hardly any clothes on, teachers are yelling at you, kids are throwing dodge balls at you and snapping towels - you're trying to survive. And then it's Science,Language, and History. Now that is a weird day. — Jerry Seinfeld

My husband and I speak an ancient language called grammatical English, and the kids speak a strange dialect which is difficult to decode because it is based on only four phrases: 'Huh,' 'I dunno,' 'It's not my turn,' and 'I do everything around here! — Teresa Bloomingdale

Let the teachers learn the kids English. Ol' Diz will learn the kids baseball. — Dizzy Dean

Mr. Lindell's English classes are meant to make you think I guess about yourself and people and everything. Some of the kids say it's pretty weird but they're more honest in English than they are anywhere else and they say more about what they feel...Everything that's said in English etches itself clearly and sharply in my mind like letters carved neatly into deep frost. But I never let them see how eagerly I listen. — John Marsden

I am making sure, as the governor of a territory, that our kids speak fluent English. But having said that, I will tell my wife I love her in Spanish, and I will pray in Spanish, and no one from Washington should come down here and tell us how to go about it. — Luis Fortuno

I just got into it like a lot of people through the rock 'n' roll bands in the late '60s that turned to country music, like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, but particularly through The Byrds because of Gram Parsons, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman (with their 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo). They kind of introduced English kids to Merle Haggard and George Jones and the Louvins (brothers Charlie and Ira). — Elvis Costello

Because, you see, a bad teacher, like Moses, the abusive English teacher that I had in Carlsbad, kills kids, here in the heart, and not just with their tests, but with their superior attitude and those sly smiles that they like to give to their A students, but never to the ones who are also working hard, or maybe even harder, like me, but just couldn't get it! — Victor Villasenor

In many college English courses the words "myth" and "symbol" are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain't no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that's how Melville did it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I've concentrated for a long time on English films because I've got two kids but my oldest son is 11 and I think I'm going to be away for about four months of year now. — Sadie Frost

The teacher will never be a parent. The parents are the parents. But they have to engage in some sort of active education beyond just teaching mathematics and French and English because the kids spend more time there than they do with their parents at that age. We have to accept that other adults will be part of our children's education and they will have bad teachers. That's going to happen. — Philippe Falardeau

Bradford specifically there were a lot of Pakistanis there. Even today it has a very large Pakistani population.It was something that I experienced - getting chased home from the bus stop after school by English kids, boarding school, being targeted for praying to what they call Allah wallah ding dong. — Aasif Mandvi

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand. — E.L. Doctorow

I wanted to write for all children, even those kids who might see language as a threatening thing, even if English is their second language. — Ursula Dubosarsky

I had a very tough childhood. I came here from Italy in the '70s and didn't speak a word of English, so the kids at school tormented me. Truly, it was horrifying the names they called me, and the teachers never really did a thing to stop it. — Giada De Laurentiis

Her laptop. That's where the good stuff would be anyway. It always was. Even at my old school, kids had always been frantic when they'd lost their laptops, thinking about all the incriminating stuff that someone might find on them. Like e-mails about how drunk the kids had gotten with their friends the weekend their parents thought they went to band camp. Papers they'd downloaded and plagiarized for AP English. Porn. — Jennifer Estep

Homework's hard. Especially math. My kids joke with me. They tell me they have homework. I say, 'Okay.' And then I sit down and they say, 'It's math.' 'No! Not math! English, history, anything!' — Angelina Jolie

When we were kids, Fitz was unbeatable in Scrabble. It would drive Eric crazy, because he wasn't used to be bested by Fitz in much of anything. But Fitz had an uncanny memory, and once he saw a word, he wouldn't forget it. [ ... ] But Eric wasn't used to be second-best, so he commissioned me into teaching him the dictionary. [ ... ] Three weeks after we'd taken on the English language, it rained on a Saturday. "Hey," Fitz suggested, like usual. "Bet I can whip you in Scrabble."
Eric looked at me. "Huh," he said, "What makes you think that?"
"Um ... the five hundred and seventy thousand other times I've kicked your ass?"
Fitz knew. The moment Eric laid down the letters J-A-R-L and then casually mentioned that it was a term for a Scandinavian noble, Fitz's eyes lit up. — Jodi Picoult

In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father. — Joel Kinnaman

I went to hockey camp at Michigan because my dad has some relatives in the Ann Arbor area. We went to visit them as kids, and you start to learn the language from being around people. At the same time, when I got to college, I thought my English was better than it really was. I learned a lot over my four years. — Carl Hagelin

I remember, the first time I came to the United States in 1996, I didn't speak a word of English at the beginning. I am very thankful for this country and the opportunity music has given me ... My three kids were born here in Miami; they speak Spanish at home, but English with all their friends. — Juanes

We've got to turn this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A's and speaking proper English: that's criminal. — Spike Lee

You'll hear people say it's racist to test. Folks, it's racist not to test. Because guess who gets shuffled through the system oftentimes? Children whose parents don't speak English as a first language, inner-city kids. It's so much easier to quit on somebody than to remediate. — George W. Bush

When we black people commit ourselves to living simply as a political action, as a way of breaking the stress caused by unrelenting hedonistic desire for material objects that are not needed for survival, or essential to well-being, we will not be talking about ebonics. We will be out in the streets demanding that the public schools have enough teachers so that all kids, cross color, can read and write in standard English and in Spanish too. — Bell Hooks

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class. — Donna Tartt

I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they've made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English. — Gary Shteyngart

Gideon and I sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me - I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had "borrowed" from her class at school. And then there was L.A. - all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different. — Paula Stokes

I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do. — Paul Reiser

MasterChef Junior for me was about working closely with these kids and getting them to reeducate their parents to understand that food is as important educationally as Math and English and it's important that we don't take it for granted. — Gordon Ramsay

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture. — Robert Plant

My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge. — Bernie Taupin

Not all of E. Nesbit's children's books are fantasies, but even the most realistic somehow seem magical. In her holiday world, nobody ever goes to school, though all the kids know their English history, Greek myths, and classic tales of derring-do. — Michael Dirda

Which brings us to the least sexy word in the English language, kids," Dad said, kicking back in his chair. "Inbreeding. Avoid it. — Sarah Rees Brennan

I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law, so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought, 'No, I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher; that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne. — John Mahoney

Hockey historians say the handshake dates to English settlers in Canada, who preached an upper-class version of sportsmanship in the 19th century. Soon, tough kids in urban and prairie rinks began imitating imagined dukes and earls of the old country. — George Vecsey

When I was teaching English and trying to get kids passionate about reading, the most effective weapon I had was 'The Martian Chronicles.' — Jack McDevitt

When you get into the third or fourth generation of Latino immigrants to the United States, you see the kids speaking more English than Spanish, and it's important that we don't lose our identity, our language. — Thalia

My dad tells me that he took us to a pantomime when I was very, very small - panto being a sort of English phenomenon. There's traditionally a part of the show where they'll invite kids up on the stage to interact with the show. I was too young to remember this, but my dad says that I was running up onstage before they even asked us. — Dan Stevens

Like anything, you don't force kids to cook. It just becomes part of life - have them be around it, keep them informed - talk about it. I try to relay my passion for it in these ways. The second you try to force anything on your own kid, they rebel. — Todd English

It seems like we ever met," said Oriash, and his words make the kids fell silent. "Ever ... and so far away from this time. I ever knew you!" he continued more seriously. — K.A.Z. Violin

For Father's Day, my kids always give me a bottle of cologne called English Leather. It's appropriate! To them I always smell like a wallet. — Robert Orben

My grandfather came over from Puerto Rico and raised his kids speaking English so that it would be easier for them to assimilate. — Aubrey Plaza

It was always important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor's mind. — Saul Williams

How would you like your child in kindergarten through 12th grade attending classes with kids who can't read, write, speak or understand English
or American education values? Furthermore, how would you feel if those students felt zero investment in education, in English and the American way? How would you like your child's education dumbed down to that of a classroom from the Third World? Guess what? Today, if you're a parent of a child in thousands of classrooms across America, that's what's happening to your children with your tax dollars. — Frosty Wooldridge

The clerical work is par for the course. "Keep on file in numerical order" means throw in wastebasket. You'll soon learn the language. "Let it be a challenge to you" means you're stuck with it; "interpersonal relationships" is a fight between kids; "ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline" means call the cops; "Language Arts Dept." is the English office; "literature based on child's reading level and experiential background" means that's all they've got in the Book Room; "non-academic-minded" is a delinquent; and "It has come to my attention" means you're in trouble. — Bel Kaufman

It was common for my father to sit my sisters down and tell them things like, "I saw a girl working in the bank in town, and she was a girl just like you." My parents had never completed primary school. They couldn't speak English or even read that well. My parents only knew the language of numbers, buying and selling, but they wanted more for their kids. That's why my father had scraped the money together and kept Annie in school, despite the famine and other troubles. — William Kamkwamba