{"quotes":[{"text":"Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'.'To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English,' Peter said. 'It's taken me most of today to get through a page.","author":"Justin Cronin","tags":["book","english","moby-dick","reading"],"id":1403,"author_id":"Justin+Cronin"},{"text":"Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays….","author":"Stephen Fry","tags":["english","humour","pretentiousness","university"],"id":6608,"author_id":"Stephen+Fry"},{"text":"Words are instruments, they are tools that, in their different ways, are as effective as any sharp edge or violate chemical. They are, like coins, items of great value, but they represent a currency that, well spent, returns ever greater riches.","author":"Tim Radford","tags":["english","inspirational","literature","power-of-words","words"],"id":7355,"author_id":"Tim+Radford"},{"text":"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.","author":"James D. Nicoll","tags":["english","grammar","humor","misattributed-terry-pratchett","vocabulary"],"id":8673,"author_id":"James+D.+Nicoll"},{"text":"Shani Chalisa॥दोहा॥ Dohaजय-जय श्री शनिदेव प्रभु, सुनहु विनय महराज।करहुं कृपा हे रवि तनय, राखहु जन की लाज॥Shani Maharaj, glory to you with sincerity,Listen to my prayers I request humbly,Bestow your grace and protect me fully,Keep respect and honour of your devotees.- 341 -.","author":"Munindra Misra","tags":["chalisa","chants","deva","english","god","goddess","hindu","hinduism","misra","munidra","prayer","rhyme","shani","worship"],"id":16199,"author_id":"Munindra+Misra"},{"text":"The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in 'Lonesome Dove' and had nightmares about slavery in 'Beloved' and walked the streets of Dublin in 'Ulysses' and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in 'A Prayer for Owen Meany.' I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language. ","author":"Pat Conroy","tags":["conroy","english","literature","reading","teachers"],"id":20095,"author_id":"Pat+Conroy"},{"text":"Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!' And the Eaglet bend down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.","author":"Lewis Carroll","tags":["alice-in-wonderland","english","language","mocking","speech","wonderland"],"id":22256,"author_id":"Lewis+Carroll"},{"text":"I'm a writer to the bone. I love this language you and I read, write and speak. It's called English. And I'm seriously doubting that it's known to some of the unseen people who write the news.","author":"Ann Medlock","tags":["english","fake-news","language","media","news"],"id":24062,"author_id":"Ann+Medlock"},{"text":"Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.","author":"John M. Keller","tags":["books","english","globalization","technology"],"id":27054,"author_id":"John+M.+Keller"},{"text":"An Indian child is brought up in England, and he will speak both English and Hindi very well. English in school and Hindi at home. But here it’s English both in schools and at home. Why can’t you speak Swahili with your child at home? If this continues we will turn into an English speaking country.","author":"Enock Maregesi","tags":["child","england","english","english-speaking-country","hindi","home","indian","school","schools","speak","swahili","turn"],"id":28074,"author_id":"Enock+Maregesi"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":185,"pages":19,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}