Fluent Quotes & Sayings

I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician. — Paula Fox

New Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is fluent in Chinese. In a short period of time the Republicans have come quite a long way. The last Republican president wasn't even fluent in English. — David Letterman

Mew - mew. Mew." I jump back from her finger swipes. "I am fluent in pussy, but I have no idea what this fucking means, Georgia. — Pella Grace

Nothing any man can do will improve that genius; but the genius needs his mind, and he can broaden that mind, fertilize it with knowledge of all kinds, improve its powers of expression; supply the genius, in short, with an orchestra instead of a tin whistle. All our little great men, our one-poem poets, our one-picture painters, have merely failed to perfect themselves as instruments. The Genius who wrote The Ancient Mariner is no less sublime than he who wrote The Tempest; but Coleridge had some incapacity to catch and express the thoughts of his genius - was ever such wooden stuff as his conscious work? - while Shakespeare had the knack of acquiring the knowledge necessary to the expression of every conceivable harmony, and his technique was sufficiently fluent to transcribe with ease. — Aleister Crowley

And human instinct is ancient and reliable, utterly mysterious and possibly capable of great genius. I believe that refined, fluent instincts are a person's most valuable asset. My own instincts have repeatedly guided me against the grain of logic and probability. When I have trusted and followed their direction, they have never been wrong. I don't know how or why. But I know that every significant experience-positive or negative-sharpens them and makes them more accurate. — Augusten Burroughs

And I think for a moment, because people don't actually ask that very often. They tell me what they think I feel because they've read it in books, or they say incredible things like "autistic people have no sense of humour or imagination or empathy" when I'm standing right there beside them (and one day I'm going to point out that that is more than a little bit rude, not to mention Not Even True) or they -- even worse -- talk to me like I'm about five, and can't understand.
"It's like living with all your senses turned up to full volume all the time," I say. "And it's like living life in a different language, so you can't ever quite relax because even when you think you're fluent it's still using a different part of your brain so by the end of the day you're exhausted. — Rachael Lucas

When does the mind put forth its powers? when are the stores of memory unlocked? when does wit 'flash from fluent lips?'
when but after a good dinner? Who will deny its influence on the affections? Half our friends are born of turbots and truffles. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in 'Tinker, Tailor,' was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I'm such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days. — John Le Carre

I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport. — William Gibson

Paris was all so ... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French! — David Nicholls

Aspirin? I asked. It came out sounding a lot like ass spoon, but Zayvion seemed fluent in mumbleze. — Devon Monk

If the goal you've set for yourself has a 100 percent chance of success, then frankly you aren't aiming high enough. — Benny Lewis

She's French, so she's teaching them French, and their previous nanny was Spanish, so they're fluent in Spanish. — Gwyneth Paltrow

Although this man spoke pure fluent ghetto, she liked his spirit. She could tell he was attracted to her, and that he was being ever careful with his words. — Brandi L. Bates

There is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression ... We have yet to become fluent in the language -and music- of the wild. — Boyd Norton

Connor pockets his cell. "Lily," he says. "If I wanted to date for a last name, I'd have a girl on my arm every single day. I would never be single." He leans forward. "I promise you, that my intentions are pure. And I think it's sweet you're looking out for Rose, but she's more than capable of taking care of herself, which is one of the many reasons why I want to pursue her." "What's another reason?" I test him. He smiles. "I won't have to taxingly explain to her menu items in a real French restaurant." He knows she's fluent? "I won't have to explain financial statements or dividends. I'll be able to discuss anything and everything in the world, and she'll have an answer. — Krista Ritchie

There is a risk of becoming linguistically schizophrenic. Because your brain is so fluent in both languages, it is fooled into thinking that the structure you have put together in the target language is correct merely because it is correct in the source language. — Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown

Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA's Clandestine Service - African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who'd already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work. — Michael Hastings

As the brain and body were shaped by natural selection, consumer goods adapted to the mind through a parallel process of product selection, which has rendered them ever more fluent, expressive, and fascinating to our senses. — David B. Givens

Fluent speech, there are no real spaces between words, so when two words frequently appear together they can easily fuse into one. — Guy Deutscher

She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat. — Anthony Marra

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
Travellers at least have a chose. Those who set sail know know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are perpared. But for us, who travel to cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparaton. We who are fluent find liffe is a foreign language. Somewhere beween the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere beween fear and sex. Somewere beween God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse. — Jeanette Winterson

J. R. R. Tolkien, undisputedly a most fluent speaker of this language, was criticized in his day for indulging his juvenile whim of writing fantasy, which was then considered - as it still is in many quarters - an inferior form of literature and disdained as mere "escapism." "Of course it is escapist," he cried. "That is its glory! When a soldier is a prisoner of war it is his duty to escape - and take as many with him as he can." He went on to explain, "The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as possible. — Stephen R. Lawhead

I wanted to show the world, and myself too, what I can do. I came up in the world of Philadelphia soul, but I'm fluent in a lot of languages musically and I like working with different people from different generations. — Daryl Hall

The technology has become like a phantom limb, it is so much a part of them. These young people are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection: always on, and always on them. And they are among the first to grow up not necessarily thinking of simulation as second best. All of this makes them fluent with technology but brings a set of new insecurities. — Sherry Turkle

For example, suppose you are seeking a job as a retail manager. You might bring added value by being fluent in English, Spanish, and French. Being trilingual may not be part of the job description but can be a valuable asset when working with diverse employees and customers who speak Spanish and French. This Value-Added message may tip the scale in your favor. Possibly you are seeking a job as a fifth grade teacher. If you are an expert in computers and computer programming, these skills may not be part of the job description but might be perceived as having high value to an academic institution. If you are an expert electrician, but you are also highly skilled in sales, this added value of contributing to new business development efforts might be the differentiator, the added skill that will help you land a job quickly in tough markets. — Jay A. Block

Stop your bitching, Nick. You should try being an immortal demon who's lived since the dawn of time having to sit through this crap when English is not my native tongue, and if you think you're fluent in it, buddy, I actually know what a gerund is. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

It is easy to see in retrospect that what I longed for was not a boyfriend but a version of me without my defects
a man in whom I could see myself as flawless, a man whose jokes always caused riotous laughter instead of sometimes falling flat, whose German was fluent instead of passable, who actually knew everything instead of pretending to and then Googling it when he got home. — Joel Derfner

Chess is like a language, the top players are very fluent at it. Talent can be developed scientifically but you have to find first what you are good at. — Viswanathan Anand

We were kissing like it was a long-forgotten language that we'd once been fluent in and were finding again — Morgan Matson

Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages.
"I hate you," she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless. "I really, really hate you." Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help taking it personally. — David Sedaris

The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate
itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. — Emma Goldman

I'm trying to tell
MiSSSisss WaSShington
about our ceremony for Father.
But it takes time to
match every noun and verb,
sort all the tenses,
remember all the articles,
set the tone for every s.
MiSSSisss WaSShington says
if every learner waits
to speak perfectly,
no one would learn
a new language.
Being stubborn
won't make you fluent.
Practicing will!
The more mistakes you make,
the more you'll learn not to.
They laugh. — Thanhha Lai

The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less. At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months. — Tim Ferriss

Over 90 percent of parents in Puerto Rico want their children to be totally fluent in English. — Luis Fortuno

All the Kamals were fluent in irritation. They loved each other but were almost always annoyed by each other, in ways that were both generalised and existential (why is he like that?) and also highly specific (how hard is it to remember to put the top back on the yoghurt?). — John Lanchester

Native speakers can rarely explain the grammatical rules of their own language. In the same way, those who are most 'fluent' in the rituals, customs and traditions of a particular culture generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the 'grammar' of these practices in an intelligible manner. This is why we have anthropologists. — Kate Fox

Even though Cammie is fluent in fourteen languages and capable of killing a man seven different ways with her bare hands, she has no idea what to do when she meets an ordinary boy who thinks she's an ordinary girl. — Ally Carter

fluent in being human." "In — Chelsea M. Campbell

I could never learn to be totally fluent in any other language. — Max Von Sydow

As science has become more abstract and remote from everyday experience, the role of metaphor in our descriptions of the world has become more central. The language that nature speaks, as Galileo long pointed out, is mathematics. The language that ordinary human beings speak, especially those of us who are not fluent in mathematics, is metaphor. Lightman ends his discussion with another metaphor: "We are blind men, imagining what we don't see." That is a good description of theoretical physics. — Freeman Dyson

Poor Excuses for Men {Couplet}
Every now and then good ink flows fluent from my playful pen,
Causing jealous minds to moulder in these poor excuses for men. — Beryl Dov

Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to
make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If
we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for
personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing
a part of our lives? — Alan Kay

I was deeply impressed and moved by his masterful playing. He was highly polished, profound, subtle, and intense. He was extremely fluent in a great combination of the traditional vernacular with his own. Hearing it unfold and being in a position to participate was a great pleasure. Part of being an accompanist is that the stronger the soloist, the more I can do all that I know to do. So, Joe was as good as it gets. — Pete La Roca

True love was a language, so many looks, touches and one word references that told the other more than full sentences of paragraphs, more than full outpourings of speech.
Our language was extensive and beautiful, and over a joyful lifetime together, we stayed fluent in it. — R.K. Lilley

That was a tall order for Ivy. Sarcasm was kind of her native tongue, though she was fluent in "stern disappointment" and "light condescension" as well. She was also a good friend. Well, imaginary friend. — Brandon Sanderson

I learned my French through school. I was lucky in that the tutor on 'The Wonder Years' set spoke fluent French. — Danica McKellar

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse. — Jeanette Winterson

Pick a destination, go there, be open-minded and talk to the locals. Eat the things they eat and go where they go. You don't need to be fluent, just as long as you've got a smile on your face- people will be jumping over themselves to show you the stuff they're proud of. — Jamie Oliver

Mindy Sue, you are a pretty, lively, successful female, fluent in French and German. You are a professional woman but also sportif. You care buckets, I can see that. How did you get yourself in this terrible predicament? How did you become a four-line seventy-five-cents-a-word advertisement in the back pages of The New York Review of Books? — Donald Barthelme

TooDamn-Funky: It's a start, ok. Been thinking bout the boyz. 'member last year my bro did that immersion thing in Venezuela?
Kciker5525: Where he learned to speak Spanish???
TooDamn-Funky: Yeah! u go for 2 weeks talk nothing but Spanish u come back fluent.
Kicker5535: ... ????
TooDamn-Funky: Well this is like a guy immersion program!
Kicker5525: So ... what. I'm going 2 b fluent in GUY?
TooDamn-Funky: Exactly! u will c what they talk about alone. U will c how they r with each other. U will c how they THINK!! AND WHEN IT'S DONE YOU'LL BE ABLE TO WRITE A GUY GUIDE BOOK!!
Kicker5525: U r deranged. — Kate Brian

Mind was impure and his moral behavior was gross. But he had in lavish abundance some of the dramatic trappings of holiness. Along with his burning eyes, he had a fluent tongue. His head was filled with Scriptures, and his deep, powerful voice made him a compelling preacher. Besides, he had wandered the length and breadth of Russia and twice made pilgrimages to the Holy Land. He presented himself as a humble penitent, a man who had sinned greatly, been forgiven and commanded to do God's work. It was a touching symbol of his humility, people said, that he kept the nickname "Rasputin" which he had earned as a young man in his native village. "Rasputin" in Russian means "dissolute. — Robert K. Massie

So, if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me for I, too, am fluent in silence. — R. Arnold

I like to travel, and I would love to be fluent in at least four languages. — Paul O'Grady

For instance, to be fluent with the various LOVE IS A JOURNEY expressions, one has to fathom the conceptual metaphor in considerable depth. Lakoff explains:
The lovers are travelers on a journey together, with their common life goals seen as destinations to be reached. The relationship is their vehicle, and it allows them to pursue those common goals together. The relationship is seen as fulfilling its purpose as long as it allows them to make progress toward their common goals. The journey isn't easy. There are impediments, and there are places (crossroads) where a decision has to be made about which direction to go in and whether to keep traveling together. — Steven Pinker

By the beginning of March, K Company, 333rd Regiment, had reached the Rhine. The men settled down in the village of Krefeld to await Montgomery's Operation Plunder, the crossing of the river; Monty was planning the operation with as much care as he had put into Operation Overlord, so the pause was a long one. By some miracle, the men found an undamaged high-rise apartment building in which everything worked - electricity, hot water, flush toilets, and telephones with dial tones. The had their first hot baths in four months. They found cigars and bottles go cognac. Pvt. Ray Bocarski, fluent in German, lit up, sat down in an easy chair, got a befuddled German operator on the phone, and talked his way through to a military headquarters in Berlin. He told the German officer he could expect K Company within the week. — Stephen E. Ambrose

I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and with a tongue fluent only in praise. — Pat Conroy

I speak pretty fluent American, though I do so with a strong British accent, and I love America: The scale and the variety of it are astonishing to someone not born there, and I'm convinced that its energy and generosity have somehow rubbed off on me and affected my writing. For the better. — Laurie Graham

Samuel became even more interested in politics than his father had been, served the Republican Party tirelessly as a king-maker, caused that party to nominate men who would whirl like dervishes, bawl fluent Babylonian, and order the militia to fire into crowds whenever a poor man seemed on the point of suggesting that he and a Rosewater were equal in the eyes of the law. — Kurt Vonnegut

Miyata was fluent and intelligent. Nothing was beyond his curiosity. He seemed to be above the confusion of life, as if he had been commissioned to spend his own in undisturbed judgement of the world about him, protected always by a mandate from the gods. They spoke briefly of Korea and then of the past war with the United States. Miyata had been in Japan for its entire duration and must have been deeply affected, but when he talked about it, it was without bitterness. Wars were not of his doing. He considered them almost poetically, as if they were seasons, the cruel winters of man, even though almost all the work he had done in the 1930s and early 1940s had been lost when his house was burned in the great incendiary raid of 1944. He described the night vividly, the endless hours, the bombers thundering low over the storms of fire. — James Salter

You don't understand!' Foaly objected.
Trouble cut him off with a chop of his hand through the air. 'I never understand. That's why we pay you and your dork posse.
Foaly objected again. 'They are not dorks!'
Trouble found space for yet another holster. 'Really? That guy brings a Beanie Baby to work every day. And your nephew, Mayne, speaks fluent Unicorn.'
'They're not all dorks,' said Foaly, correcting himself. — Eoin Colfer

I really want to do a film in another language. My dad's from Germany, so it'd be really cool to do a film in German. I'm not quite fluent, but I can get there. And my accent's pretty good. I wouldn't feel too out of my element. — Kirsten Dunst

Mark Waugh, the most fluent and aesthetically pleasing batsman of his generation but also one of the most frustrating to watch. Often, when he appeared to be a class above the rest and to have the bowling at his mercy, he would play a lazy shot to what appeared, more often than not, an innocuous delivery. And just like that his innings would be over. To make matters worse, he didn't seem to care; he would nonchalantly wander off the field. No shaking of the head or staring back at the pitch to apportion blame. His fans had to learn to accept 30s and 40s instead of centuries and 150s. His concentration, some would say his interest, never seemed to be there in the Test arena. Despite playing some match-winning Test innings, Waugh was never quite able to shake the 'lackadaisical' tag. — Sean Ehlers

Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this. — John Cage

Oh, Jesus," he said, wheezing with the effort it took to control
himself. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "You little
innocent. I'm fluent in French, but it isn't my first language." It
was plain by the mortified expression in those green eyes that she
didn't understand, so he explained. "Baby , if I can still think
clearly enough to speak French, then I'm not totally involved in
what I'm doing. It may sound pretty , but it doesn't mean
any thing. Men are different from women; the more excited we are,
the more like cavemen we sound. I could barely speak English with
you, much less French. As I remember, my vocabulary
deteriorated to a few short, explicit words, 'fuck' being the most
prominent."
To his amazement, she blushed, and he smiled at this further
evidence of her charming prudery. "Go to sleep," he said gently.
"Lindsey didn't even rate a replay. — Linda Howard

You're not . . . normal, Clara. You try to pretend you are. But you're not. You talked to a grizzly bear, and it obeyed you. Birds follow you like a Disney cartoon, or haven't you noticed? And for a while after you came back from Idaho Falls, Wendy thought you were on the run from someone or something. You're good at everything you try. You ride a horse like you were born in the saddle, you ski perfect parallel turns your first time on the hill, you apparently speak fluent French and Korean and who knows what else. Yesterday I noticed that your eyebrows kind of glitter in the sun. And there's something about the way you move, something that's beyond graceful, something that's beyond human, even. It's like you're . . . something else. — Cynthia Hand

The old alone have finality. What is true of the young today may be false tomorrow. They are enveloped in emotion; and emotion as a state of being is fluent and evanescent. — Ellen Glasgow

I was born in Eastern Europe, in Latvia, and I'm fluent in Russian. — Ksenia Solo

As the child approaches a new text he is entitled to an introduction so that when he reads, the gist of the ... story can provide some guide for a fluent reading. — Marie Clay

I actually speak fluent English and Spanish and ... I dabble in a couple of languages, but I'm not fluent in German, Russian and Arabic. — Cote De Pablo

Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who discovers her husband is cheating on her with one of her grad students, and who, while feigning ignorance of the affair, drives the girl mad with increasingly brutal critiques and research tasks, at one point banishing her to Beirut, first to learn fluent Arabic and then to read Avicenna's Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, housed in the American University. This was, Amy thought, a showoffy detail that hinted at Marzen's impressive erudition but was probably arrived at within five Googling minutes. — Jincy Willett

It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 years ago, I went to Rome for the first time and felt an instant gut connection and wanted to get to know the city. — Jhumpa Lahiri

There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one's feet sends one to the page and a habit is born. — Lorrie Moore

Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet toits god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought. — Havelock Ellis

I am just like 99% of my friends in France, who say on their resume they can speak fluent English. In reality, they can't even count up to three. — Greg Akcelrod

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells. — Ralph Ellison

I wish I could fly. Or speak fluent Chinese. Both I think are equally impossible. — Karlie Kloss

Read your work aloud, if you can, if you aren't too embarrassed by the sound of your voice ringing out when you are alone in a room. Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stumbling is a sentence that needs to be reworked to make it smoother and more fluent. A poet once told me that he was reading a draft of a new poem aloud to himself when a thief broke into his Manhattan loft. Instantly surmising that he had entered the dwelling of a madman, the thief turned and ran without taking anything, and without harming the poet. So it maybe that reading your work aloud will not only improve its quality but save your life in the process. — Francine Prose

Visual art is a foreign language I'm fluent at, but my native language is language. — Julia Glass

He gave a small nod, and I smiled back, and that was it. He understood that I'd understood that he'd understood. It took us one sentence, two looks, and a nod - with another woman it would have been at least five minutes of out-loud talking. Lucky for me I spoke fluent guy. — Laurell K. Hamilton

People fluent in two languages can lose either one after trauma, since first and second languages* draw on distinct neural circuits. Language deficits can even interfere with math. We seem to have a natural "number circuit" in the parietal lobe that handles comparisons and magnitudes - the basis of most arithmetic. But we learn some things (like the times tables) linguistically, by rote memorization. So if language goes kaput, so too will those linguistically based skills. More strikingly, some people who struggle to string even three words together can sing just fine. — Sam Kean

Rather than inserting more Marines and engineers to harden and defend the American Embassy - thus sending an unequivocal message that such an assault against American sovereign territory in the heart of Tehran would never be tolerated again - the bureaucrats back at the White House and State Department had panicked. They'd reduced the embassy's staff from nearly a thousand to barely sixty. The Pentagon had shown a similar lack of resolve. The number of U.S. military forces in-country had been drawn down from about ten thousand active-duty troops to almost none. The only reason Charlie had been sent in - especially as green as he was - was because he happened to be one of the few men in the entire U.S. diplomatic corps who was actually fluent in Farsi. None of the three CIA guys on site even spoke the language. — Joel C. Rosenberg

I am fluent in snark.
Bethany only notices snark when snark grabs her off the sidewalk, throws her in the back of a sketchy van with tinted windows, drives to the middle
of the Meadow-lands in the dead of night, and uses a heavy blunt instrument
to smack her repeatedly about the head as it screams, "I'M SNARK. DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME? I'M SNARKY SNARKY SNARK!" And even then she's like, "Ohhhh? Snark? Is that you? — Megan McCafferty

Bloody North," said Shev as she picked her way towards it and had a tentative drag at the ropes. "Even their bridges are shit."
"Their men are good," said Javre, clattering out with no fear whatsoever. "Far from subtle, but enthusiastic."
"Great," said Shev as she edged after, exchanging a mutually suspicious glance with a crow perched atop one of the posts. "Men. The one thing that interests me not at all."
"You should try them."
"I did. Once. Bloody useless. Like trying to have a conversation with someone who doesn't even speak your language, let alone understand the topic."
"Some are certainly more horizontally fluent than others."
"No. Just no. The hairiness, and the lumpiness, and the great big fumbling fingers and ... balls. I mean, balls. What's that about? That is one singularly unattractive piece of anatomy. That is just ... that is bad design, is what that is. — Joe Abercrombie

To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words. — Jeanette Winterson

Theodore Finch leans against an SUV, hands in pockets, like he has all the time in the world and he expects me. I think of the Virginia Woolf lines, the ones from The Waves: Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here. — Jennifer Niven

Her hope was to embarrass me. Little does she know, I'm fluent in Asshole. — S.L. Jennings

During the 1980s, when Japan's economy was roaring and people were writing books with titles like 'Japan is Number One,' most Japanese college students didn't make the effort to become fluent in English. — Rebecca MacKinnon

I had come to Charleston as a young boy, a lonely visitor slouching through its well-tended streets, a young boy, lean and grassy, who grew fluent in his devotion and appreciation of that city's inestimable charm. I was a boy there and saw things through the eyes of a boy for the last time. The boy was dying and I wanted to leave him in the silent lanes South of Broad.I would leave him with no regrets except that I had not stopped to honor his passing. I had not thanked the boy for his capacity for astonishment, for curiosity, and for survival. I was indebted to that boy. I owed him my respect and my thanks. I owed him my remembrance of the lessons he learned so keenly and so ominously. — Pat Conroy

I might be more fluent in Swedish than I am in Spanish. My wife speaks it to our kids, and they're fluent so I hear it all the time, so I've got that under my belt. — Will Ferrell

The city's legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, "Our Carter," even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale, spoke fluent French and German, and recited lengthy passages from Shakespeare. — Erik Larson

I must say I'm not 100% fluent in Sign Language, but I am working on it! — Sundra Oakley

He was fluent in nineteen modern languages, five ancient languages and the one true universal language - pain. — Tiffany Reisz

Ah, the ancient language of sarcasm. How it suits you."
"Why thank you, petal. It is one of my many talents, and I happen to be fluent in the language." I dazzled him with my smile.
"You need to give me a manly nickname."
"You haven't given me any reason to give you one yet."
"That's harsh. — Elizabeth Morgan

One of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound's Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It's epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you'd be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French-he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who's not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something. — Richard Misrach

I unfortunately don't speak French, but my wife is now fluent in English, which really reflects rather badly on me. — Sean Connery

I'm sorry, what did you say? I'm not fluent in stupid drunk slut — Christine Zolendz

I actually speak fluent German. And I live in Vienna, and I'm married to a Viennese woman. — Peter Morgan

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

We are never far from the lilt and swirl of living water. Whether to fish or swim or paddle, of only to stand and gaze, to glance as we cross a bridge, all of us are drawn to rivers, all of us happily submit to their spell. We need their familiar mystery. We need their fluent lives interflowing with our own. — John Daniel