English Proficiency Quotes

1. "Shelby looked over to see Andrew silently mouthing syllables to himself, as if he were part of an ecstatic rite. He grinned as he bit fricatives and tongued plosives. He was tasting English origins, mulling over words ripped from bronze-smelling hoards. Words that had slept beneath centuries of dust and small rain, sharp and bright as scale mail. Poetry had never moved her quite so much as drama. She loved the shock of colloquy, the beat and treble of words doing what they had to on stage. Andrew preferred the echo of poems buried alive."
Author: Bailey Cunningham

2. "I've made a dog's breakfast of English history, geography, 'King Lear,' and the English language in general."
Author: Christopher Moore

3. "I remember when your name was just another name that rolled without thought off my tongue.Now, I can't look at your name without an abundance of sentiment attached to each lettter.Your name, which I played with so carelessly, so easily, has somehow become sacred to my lips.A name I won't throw around lightheartedly or repeat without deep thought.And if ever I speak of you, I use the English language to describe who you were to me. You are nameless, because those letters grouped together in that familiar form….. carries too much meaning for my capricious heart."
Author: Coco J. Ginger

4. "I'm fully aware," Firth told a reporter for the English magazine Now, "that if I were to change professions tomorrow, become an astronaut and be the first man to land on Mars, the headlines in the newspapers would read: `Mr. Darcy Lands on Mars."
Author: Colin Firth

5. "There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city."
Author: Cornelia Otis Skinner

6. "Australians are descended from a boatload of English convicts, right? So two hundred years in isolation at the bottom of the planet is plenty of time for the language to evolve into some sort of double-speak prison slang."
Author: Elle Lothlorien

7. "Sheriff Gibbs, the vocabulary of the English language is the wonder of the whole world. Chaucer spoke it and Shakespeare and Winston Churchill. With such a precedent, you could possibly make better use of it," said Mrs. Perley."Huh," said Sheriff Gibbs"
Author: Gary D. Schmidt

8. "The irony of this endeavor is palpable, for English itself is a hopeless hodgepodge of other tongues, with more exceptions than rules, more chaos than order, and enough new words created each day to keep the Oxford English Dictionary folks very, very busy."
Author: George Takei

9. "Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, "I am sad," or "I am happy". They understood what we English have long forgot. We're not our sadness. We're not our happiness or our pain but our language hypnotizes us and traps us in little labelled boxes."
Author: Grant Morrison

10. "My mother tongue, Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende. For example, in Mende, you wouldn't say 'night came suddenly'; you would say 'the sky rolled over and changed its sides.'"
Author: Ishmael Beah

11. "In English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room, a page someone forgot to rip out of a calendar, the walking embodiment of jet lag."
Author: Jean Christophe Valtat

12. "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."
Author: Jodi Picoult

13. "Bird, hesitating, recalled a line from the English textbook he was reading with his students; a young American was speaking angrily: Are you kidding me? Are you looking for a fight?"
Author: Kenzaburō Ōe

14. "What Hamlet suffers from is a lack of zombies. Let us say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up—Ho-HO! Now you've got something that stirs the, um, something that stirs things that are stirrable. BOOM! A pack of ravenous flesh-eaters breaks open their heads and sucks out their eyeballs. No need for iambic pentameter because they are grunting, groaning annihilators of humanity with no time for meter. You're not asleep in the back of English class anymore, are you? This is what I'm talking about. Zombies. Learn it, live it, love it."
Author: Libba Bray

15. "Although an increasing proportion of the Hispanic population is foreign-born - about half of adults in this group - English proficiency is and should remain a requirement for citizenship."
Author: Linda Chavez

16. "Oh, Jesus," he said, wheezing with the effort it took to controlhimself. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "You littleinnocent. I'm fluent in French, but it isn't my first language." Itwas plain by the mortified expression in those green eyes that shedidn't understand, so he explained. "Baby , if I can still thinkclearly enough to speak French, then I'm not totally involved inwhat I'm doing. It may sound pretty , but it doesn't meanany thing. Men are different from women; the more excited we are,the more like cavemen we sound. I could barely speak English withyou, much less French. As I remember, my vocabularydeteriorated to a few short, explicit words, ‘fuck' being the mostprominent."To his amazement, she blushed, and he smiled at this furtherevidence of her charming prudery. "Go to sleep," he said gently."Lindsey didn't even rate a replay."
Author: Linda Howard

17. "Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of "The Lord of the Rings". You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold."
Author: Lynne Truss

18. "'Othello' was my first Shakespearean discovery. I was obsessed with drama at school, and I studied the play for my English GCSE. Desdemona is the part that everyone wants, but Iago's wife Emilia is the one I've always been drawn to."
Author: Michelle Dockery

19. "There, Clover found the "gardens and great trees and old cottages...so beautiful" that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, "this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unreal, eccentric, and taken out of novels."
Author: Natalie Dykstra

20. ". . .when the album was done I loved it. It was a mixture of electric and acoustic solo performances with dubs. I called it Le Noise, after Dan. It was a French Canadian joke, a very English was of saying Lanois. I was doing a show that introduced a lot of the songs, and things were going great. I was very happy."
Author: Neil Young

21. "I think English people were a lot better at breakdancing than they were at making records."
Author: Norman Cook

22. "I did a film when I was about 30; it's a coming of age story called 'Gas Food Lodging,' and I'm so proud of that little independent film. I play this young English geologist, and he's such a simple, loving kind of guy. Doesn't talk too much. He's just a quiet guy, and he gets the girl."
Author: Robert Knepper

23. "As we have seen, French culture and language interacted with native English culture for several generations after the Norman Conquest. A common word such as 'castle' is a French loan word, for example; and the whole romance tradition comes from the French. But this sensibility, culture, and language becomes integrated with native culture.As well as the beginnings of what came to be called a courtly love tradition, we can find in Early Middle English (around the time that Layamon was writing Brut) the growth of a local tradition of songs and ballads."
Author: Ronald Carter

24. "There was, Katherine speculated, no possible way of concealing his Englishness, or any English person's Englishness for that matter. You could spot them immediately - pasty white; muffin bellied; Rorschached with quasi-Celtic tattoos."
Author: Sam Byers

25. "English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."
Author: Terry Pratchett

26. "Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country."
Author: Theodore Roosevelt

27. "Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to."
Author: Thornton Wilder

28. "For example, I loved English and history at school. I would have loved to have done a degree in either. But my Mom said I didn't have time for university."
Author: Vanessa Mae

29. "Silly of me not to have realized it. One often finds Greek temples lurking in the woods of English estates. Sneaky things, temples."
Author: Victoria Alexander

30. "He who studies MA in English Literature but fears the name Shakespeare is one who studies shadow but afraid of its statue."
Author: Vikrant Parsai

English Proficiency Quotes Pictures