World English Language Day Quotes & Sayings

And yet in Britain, despite the constant buffetings of history, English survived. It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world. — Bill Bryson

I realize that the English language is sadly devoid of names for people like me. I try to cut the world some slack for this every day. All day. And the day after that, too. But the truth is that every time I am misgendered, a tiny little sliver of me disappears, A tiny little sliver of me is reminded that I do not fit ... I remember that the truth of me is invisible, and a tiny little sliver of me disappears. Just a sliver, razored from the surface of my very thick skin most days, but other times right from my soul, sometimes felt so deep and other days simply shrugged off, but still. All those slivers add up to something much harder to pretend around. — Ivan E. Coyote

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

When I was about 17, I didn't speak. English was like a foreign language. I'd just grunt. The only time I talked was when I said my lines on set. I didn't speak to any of the actors or anything. Then one day Alison from the Corrie press office started talking to me in the green room and I just decided to talk back. She ran upstairs to tell everyone that she'd just had a 10-minute conversation with me like it was the most unbelievable thing in the world. I just woke up one day and thought, 'I'm going to talk today'. I've really made up for lost time since. — Jack P. Shepherd