Top English Quotes & Sayings

There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that. — JJ Feild

People didn't know certain things about me, which ... I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing. — Lou Reed

Because English has so many words of foreign origin, and words that look the same but mean something different depending on their context, and words that are in flux, opening and closing like flowers in time-lapse photography, the human element is especially important if we are to stay on top of the computers, which, in their determination to do our job for us, make decisions so subversive that even professional wordsmiths are taken by surprise. — Mary Norris

I peered cautiously through a loophole, trying to find the Fascist trench. 'Where are the enemy?' Benjamin waved his hand expansively. 'Over zere.' (Benjamin spoke English - terrible English.) 'But where?' According to my ideas of trench warfare the Fascists would be fifty or a hundred yards away. I could see nothing - seemingly their trenches were very well concealed. Then with a shock of dismay I saw where Benjamin was pointing; on the opposite hill-top, beyond the ravine, seven hundred metres away at the very least, the tiny outline of a parapet and a red-and-yellow flag - the Fascist position. I was indescribably disappointed. We were nowhere near them! At that range our rifles were completely useless. — George Orwell

The level of football in England is the top. English football is the leader in the world. — Pele

It's kind of a cross between, I think. It's not, you know, over the top Old English, like Lord of the Rings would be or something like that, but there is a very sophisticated air about the Asgardians[?], you know, in their dialogue, and - hold on. Okay. Um, and I'm doing an English accent in the movie. — Jaimie Alexander

Cam restored her clothing slowly, his strong hands lifting her from the beech. Crushing her close, he muttered something incomprehensible against her hair. Another spell to bind her, she thought hazily, her cheek pressed to his smooth, hard chest. "You're speaking in Romany," she mumbled.
Cam switched to English. "Amelia, I - " He stopped, as if the right words eluded him. "I can't stop myself from being jealous, any more than I can stop being half Roma. But I'll try not to be overbearing. Just say you'll be my wife."
"Please," Amelia whispered, her wits still scattered, "let me answer later. When I can think clearly."
"You do too much thinking." He kissed the top of her head. "I can't promise you a perfect life. But I can promise that no matter what happens, I'll give you everything I have. We'll be together. You inside me ... me inside you. — Lisa Kleypas

The English major is, first of all, a reader. She's got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize themselves - they read to induce a vivid, continuous, and risk-free daydream. They read for the same reason that people grab a glass of chardonnay - to put a light buzz on. The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games? — Mark Edmundson

What captivated me about you was that you opened the door to another world for me. The values that dominated my childhood had no place there. That world enchanted me. I could leave the real world behind and be someone else, without any ties or obligations. With you, I was elsewhere, in a foreign place, foreign to myself. You gave me access to another dimension when I'd always rejected any fixed identity and just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine.
By speaking to you in English, I made your language mine. I've continued to talk to you in English right up to this day, even when you answered me in French. For me, English, which I knew mainly through you and through books, was from the start like a private language that preserved our intimacy against the intrusion of the real world, and its prevailing social normals. I felt like I was building a protected and protective world with you. — Andre Gorz

Next item - three ladies, all English, a mother and two daughters. Each wears a helping of whipped white of egg on the top of their head; rather remarkable. The daughters are old, like the mother. The mother is old, like the daughters. All three are thin, flat-chested, tall, stiff, and tired-looking; their front teeth are worn outside, to intimidate plates and men. — Guy De Maupassant

I got involved through the director of the show [Top Chef], he's a director of films in Mexico; I worked with him before. I watched the show in English -many times for many years - and I always loved it. As soon as I heard about having an opportunity to showcase Mexico in a different way, to show a different side of Mexico, that is not violent, that has beautiful colors and delicious food ... I didn't think about it twice. — Ana Claudia Talancon

Command of English, spoken or written, ranks at the top in business. Our main product is words, so a knowledge of their meaning and spelling and pronunciation is imperative. If a man knows the language well, he can find out about all else. — William Feather

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry - English, Russian and French - than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several - Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke - have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. — Vladimir Nabokov

My father couldn't speak English when he went to the first grade and I had to work in a factory over Christmas and summer vacations. And I think that's the American way and one of the things that excites me about this race is that pretty much everything I've done I've started at the bottom and been able to finish at the top. — George Pataki

Sad to hear Paul Scholes is retiring, what a player! Top class and a great role model for any young English midfield player! — Jack Wilshere

I came from a Hindi medium school ... the principal felt that I would not fit into an English medium college. Though I was top in my class in school, and I got admission in other colleges, but I really wanted to study in St. Xavier's. — Lakshmi Mittal

The Philippines ranks among top off-shoring hubs in the world because of cost competitiveness and, more importantly, our highly trainable, English proficient, IT-enabled management and manpower. — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

God save the Queen and a fascist regime ... a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire — William S. Burroughs

I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that. — Joan Collins

They were experimenting with narcoanalysis and found that Old Bull had seven separate personalities, each growing worse and worse on the way down, till finally he was a raving idiot and had to be restrained with chains. The top personality was an English lord, the bottom the idiot. Halfway he was an old Negro who stood in line, waiting with everyone else and said, Some's bastards, some's ain't, that's the score. — Jack Kerouac

Michael Young, the English sociologist who coined the term "meritocracy," despised the fashion for it: first, because it is largely a smug fantasy perpetuated by those who sit at the top of the social pyramid; and second, because it bestows on those at the bottom the slur that they are there because they have no merit. Even feudalism spared the poor that insult: their lowly station was an accident of birth. — Don Watson

In the U.S., the term 'general aviation' means its exact opposite, the way 'public school' does in England. An English public school is private and, on top of that, exclusive. Likewise, general-aviation airports in the U.S. are for everyone but the general public. — Tom Wolfe

It's important that top clubs don't lose sight of the fact that it's the English Premier League and English players should be involved. — Alan Pardew

The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. — Donna Tartt

After Titanic it would have been completely foolish for me to go and try and top that. I'm an English girl, I've always loved England, I've never felt the desire to leave it for any particular reason. And whilst I'm ambitious and care very much about what I do, I'm not competitive. I also don't want to act every day of my life. () So it was important to me after Titanic to just remind myself of why it was that I was acting in the first place, which is of course because I love it. — Kate Winslet

The English were unpleasant in their own very English way. It was as if they lived at the top of the world, and naturally looked down on everyone else; 'looked down' in the sense that everyone was clearly beneath them so what else could they do? No spite or guilt, just... 'Why doesn't everyone else try harder?' There was a hint of warmth to their contempt that I found especially deplorable. — Otaro Maijo

With support jobs moving to China and India, it's not surprising that English-speaking countries' top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives. However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers' growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries. — Bob Hayes

In England everything is liberalised. Within certain boundaries and rules everybody can do what he likes. Maybe London's society has a different tempo, a different dynamic. London is fast, productive, creative but it is not England. If you want to transfer that to football, you could say: in the four big English clubs and maybe in the one or two behind them there is a top level. Everything that comes after that rather mirrors English society. It's honest, fair and hard, sometimes also fast, but not always so perfect. — Jens Lehmann

The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language. — Erez Lieberman Aiden

Oh, the English! They are always thinking of tea. They carry it by the kilogram, and they are so clumsy that they always pack it at the top. — E. M. Forster

Josie examined the booklet, candelabra on the cover, a program. Brahms, and then Psalm 16, Psalm 32, Bach. A prayer, the Mourner's Kaddish, in the flamelike Hebrew, followed by an English pronunciation, a translation. At least she would not clap in the wrong part. She remembered that night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Michael so handsome in his iridescent thrift-store suit and green silk tie, she in her Lana Turner black lace and spike heels. How they peered down from their seats in the top balcony at the horseshoe of musicians with their stands and instruments. When the music stopped, Michael caught hold of her hand. Lacing his fingers in hers, he tenderly bit her knuckles. She would have been the only one applauding. — Janet Fitch

Tonight, I'd like to fuck like every other bloody Englishman, with you on your back and me on top groaning and pumping away for a minute or so, then a nice sleep."
A sneer touched the edge of her mouth, then Isabeau laughed. "You English, you are so uninspired, a pity for your women. My soul cries for them."
"Yes, unimaginative lot that we are, we have somehow managed to colonize much of the world. — Chris Karlsen

Nate took the sheet. It was covered in the neat, curvy handwriting so many women mastered and men almost never did. The top half was the message, recopied in the same Cyrillic that it had been on the wall. Below it was the translation in English. — Peter Clines

The American language differs from the English in that it seeks the top of expression while English seeks its lowly valleys. — Salvador De Madariaga

He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, "English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top." Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, "We must love one another or die." Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction. — Bob Shacochis