If we do not get No Child Left Behind right for Limited English Proficient students, the law will be a failure for most schools in the 15th Congressional District, and for many across the nation.
I’ve always felt very English.
My grandmother always used to wear this English perfume called Tuberose and then she died and then I dated this girl who wore the same thing. Every time I hung out with her, I could only think of my recently deceased grandmother. So sometimes a signature scent can be good and sometimes it can be bad.
I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.
China’s cinema has been rising for some time; it has more exposure, so my chances of becoming internationally known are better. But the first thing I have to do is learn English. If I can grasp the language, then perhaps I can think about the U.S.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn’t speak any Russian. He didn’t care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ when I left high school, which has always been very special to me – it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I’m also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.
Everyone tells me I have a funny accent. It’s because I copy people. I learned English at school but have best friends who are French, Australian, English and American; a very weird mix.
I want to position myself as a great singer/songwriter in Korea, then jump off that into different markets. South-east Asia, China, Japan – I’ve done nothing even though I speak four languages – English, Korean, Spanish, and a little bit of Mandarin.
It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.
We are from the very middle class family. We have not come from the English medium school. We came from our regional languages school.
When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people’s exploits.
I didn’t know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.
The understatement is the English contribution to comedy.
I hate English kids rapping – complete crap.
My mum is Brazilian and very proud. I’d love to do a Brazilian film. I’ve been brought up in the Brazilian culture. My mum brought me up on my own, I cook Brazilian food, I’ve never spoken a word of English to my mother.
There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.
Now I know Hindi, and I can read and write Hindi, but the problem is that I can’t improvise when I am acting because I think in English, so I have to translate my thinking from English to Hindi, and therefore, I speak slowly.
I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.
I said, ‘I’m going to the United States to study with Stella Adler and do movies because nobody here has done it and my passion is films.’ But I came here and I didn’t speak English, I didn’t have a green card, I didn’t know I had to have an agent, I couldn’t drive, I was dyslexic.
The Divinity could be invoked as well in the English language as in the French.
You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.
When I speak in English, my expressions become different. My attitude, too. I’m not sure why, but there really is a difference. My hands move differently when I speak English.
The English Bible – a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.
I speak English without an accent, and I speak Spanish without an accent. I really do have the best of both worlds.
My father came to the U.S. from Lebanon in 1920 when he was 8 without knowing a word of English. He traveled to Green Bay, Wis., married, bought a house, and he and my mom, Helen, raised 10 kids. Everything depended on his one-man business driving a truck.
A lot of Latinos are like me: third generation, English speaking.
I think maybe the English don’t want to try something and look stupid, because they are a bit reserved.
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.
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It’s extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
I suppose that was my first bit of acting, the acquisition of an English accent. It was really just an attempt to be understood.
I was an English major at the University of Minnesota, and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression, I became the editor of the campus literary magazine.
After spending so much time in America, I started travelling with ‘In Defence of English Cooking’ by George Orwell. It’s archaic and old-fashioned in its Englishness and reminds me of home.
Independent graphic novelists have already achieved good work in terms of design, but all these great minds are writing in English. There is a need for people to write in Hindi.
I think my English is bad.
Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.
The thing is, in English I’m able to write the lyrics as I’m making the song, once I’m done with the melody.
My mom speaks English – she moved to England in the ’70s, so she’s fluent in English. We use to speak in Spanish when I was a kid all the time, me and my mom. But when I went to boarding school, I kind of lost it a little bit.
Belgium is half French-speaking and half Flemish, and I was born on the French side. So we spoke it a lot – like, in kindergarten, it was almost all French. But then I moved to New Zealand when I was 10, where we obviously spoke English all the time, so I lost the French a little bit.
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
My heritage is English, so I’m proud to be back here.
I grew up riding horses since I was eight. I rode English style and competed every weekend. I had two horses, Scout and Camille, and they were my babies. It taught me a lot about responsibility and commitment. I hope horses will always be in my life.
One notable feature is that English doesn’t have much of a system for expressing relative social status.
By the by, if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind.
Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.
I can scarcely manage to scribble a tolerable English letter. I know that I am not a scholar, but meantime I am aware that no man living knows better than I do the habits of our birds.
When you lose a spouse, you’re a widow or widower; when you lose your parents, you’re an orphan. When you lose a child, there’s no word in the English language for that position, that place that you’re left.
You never know what little idea or joke, what flame flickering really quickly, will become a song. That first idea, it can come any time. If it’s in Spanish, you go on in Spanish. If it’s in French, French. If it’s in English, English. Or Portuguese. I’ll try to do my best. I like Italian, though I don’t speak it much.
The world still consists of two clearly divided groups: the English and the foreigners. One group consists of less than 50 million people; the other of 3,950 million. The latter group does not really count.
After high school, I went to Stanford University and majored in English. Of course, that gave me a chance to do lots more reading and writing. I also received degrees in London and Dublin – where I moved to be near a charming Irishman who became my husband!
There’s always a host of voices you’re inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He’s one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.
New York City is home to so many people from so many places and the uniqueness of it is that you never feel a foreigner. English is almost hardly ever heard in the subway. In fact, it’s weird.
