Quotes About Speaking English

“A little weird? That was freakin' Bizarroville."
He pauses and looks back at me.
"Are you speaking English?”

— Susan Ee

“Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.”

— Ann Patchett

“Branson ate his salad, and left the rest of his fish untouched, while Grace tucked into his steak and kidney pudding with relish. 'I read a while ago,' he told Branson, 'that the French drink more red wine than the English but live longer. The Japanese eat more fish than the English but drink less wine and live longer. The Germans eat more red meat than the English, and drink more beer and they live longer too. You know the moral of this story?
'No'
'It's not what you eat or drink - it's speaking English that kills you.”

— Peter James

“Will non-English-speaking students start speaking English because their teachers were fired? Will children come to school ready to learn because their teachers were fired?
It would be good if our nation's education leaders recognized that teachers are not solely responsible for student test scores. Other influences matter, including the students' effort, the family's encouragement, the effects of popular culture, and the influence of poverty. A blogger called "Mrs. Mimi" wrote the other day that we fire teachers because "we can't fire poverty." Since we can't fire poverty, we can't fire students, and we can't fire families, all that is left is to fire teachers.
”

— Diane Ravitch

“Niko does seem to have a buzzard's luck, don't he? Thor said after a moment.
Tyler slanted a look at him. "What the hell does that mean?"
Thor looked startled, then grinned. "Means he's been diggin' up more snakes than he can kill."
Tyler looked at Alexander. "Is he even speaking english?"
"Niko has bad luck," Alexander translated.
Tyler looked at Thor. "You couldn't just say that?"
"I did, son, but you just can't seem to spot a goat in a flock of sheep."
Tyler scowled. "I'm pretty sure that was a insult."
"Only because it was," Niko said.
"How the hell am I supposed to get all self-righteous and pissed if I can't understand what the idiot is saying?”

— Diana Pharaoh Francis

“I am sick of speaking English like this ... I am scared that I have become a person who is always very aware of talking, speaking, and I have become a person without confidence, because I can't be me. I have become so small, so tiny, while the English culture surrounding me becomes enormous. It swallows me ... I am dominated by it ... Why do we have to force ourselves to communicate with people? Why is the process of communication so troubled and so painful?”

— Xiaolu Guo

“Leo gestured to the empty core. "The syncopator goes here. It's a multi-access gyro-valve to regulate flow. The dozen glass tubes on the outside? Those are filled with powerful, dangerous stuff. That glowing red one is Lemnos fire from my dad's forges. This murky stuff here? That's water from the River Styx. The stuff in the tubes is going to power the ship, right? Like radioactive rods in a nuclear reactor. But the mix ratio has to be controlled, and the timer is already operational."
Leo tapped the digital clock, which now read 65:15. "That means without the syncopator, this stuff is all going to vent into the chamber at the same time, in sixty-five minutes. At that point, we'll get a very nasty reaction."
Jason and Piper stared at him. Leo wondered if he'd been speaking English. Sometimes when he was agitated he slipped into Spanish, like his mom used to do in her workshop. But he was pretty sure he'd used English.”

— Rick Riordan

“Printing ballots in multiple languages costs millions of dollars every year. It also discourages immigrants from integrating into American society and gaining the benefits that come from speaking English.”

— Ernest Istook

“English should be our official language. Reading and speaking English are requirements to become a citizen.”

— Ernest Istook

“I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.”

— Edgar Ramirez

“My grandfather came over from Puerto Rico and raised his kids speaking English so that it would be easier for them to assimilate.”

— Aubrey Plaza

“I studied in American school, so yes, I grew up speaking English and Spanish. Obviously, Spanish is my first language.”

— Eiza Gonzalez

“To read makes our speaking English good.”

— Joss Whedon

“English is my language because of the history, and what I try to do - and I did that in 'Carpentaria' in particular - is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.”

— Alexis Wright

“I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night. I felt like I was standing on a shore, watching small receding shapes on the horizon. I felt like I had been speaking English, and now I realized everyone else had been speaking a different language entirely. The world was changing. And I didn't want it to.”

— Lee Child

“I don't think the elite class is only speaking the good English.”

— Mamata Banerjee

“I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she's pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do.”

— Sebastian Arcelus

“I'm very aware when I'm speaking to the English of how flat my Mid-Atlantic American voice is.”

— Martin Cruz Smith

“I wanted to be accepted. It must have been in sixth grade. It was just before the Fourth of July. They were trying out students for this patriotic play. I wanted to do Abe Lincoln, so I learned the Gettysburg Address inside and out. I'd be out in the fields pickin' the crops and I'd be memorizin'. I was the only one who didn't have to read the part, 'cause I learned it. The part was given to a girl who was a grower's daughter. She had to read it out of a book, but they said she had better diction. I was very disappointed. I quit about eighth grade. Any time anybody'd talk to me about politics, about civil rights, I would ignore it. It's a very degrading thing because you can't express yourself. They wanted us to speak English in the school classes. We'd put out a real effort. I would get into a lot of fights because I spoke Spanish and they couldn't understand it. I was punished. I was kept after school for not speaking English.”

— Studs Terkel

“People forget that there are villages and communities that are still speaking French all over Canada. I went to a bar and spoke with some French people there, and they were saying: 'I went to English school, but at home it was always French, and that's going to be the way it is for my kids.' It's important for them to keep that language alive.”

— Marc-Andre Grondin

“Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I've been speaking English since I could speak.”

— Yael Grobglas

“Being born white in South Africa or anywhere in the empire and Commonwealth automatically conferred this special status. You had no problem finding a place to live, a job, trade union membership, access to social services. Being white, speaking English, you were accepted as English, entitled to all the rights of citizenship.”

— Peter Abrahams

“In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke.”

— Iggy Pop

“Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, 'Blah, blah, blah.' That's when I get crazy.”

— Jackie Chan

“Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.”

— P. J. O'Rourke

“You know, I was a kid who had difficulty speaking English when I first immigrated. But in my head, when I read a book, I spoke English perfectly. No one could correct my Spanish. And I think that I retreated to books as a way, you know, to be, like, masterful in a language that was really difficult for me for many years.”

— Junot Diaz

“I don't believe in the so-called Latino explosion when it comes to movies. Jennifer Lopez doesn't have an accent. She grew up in New York speaking English, not Spanish. Her success is very important because she represents a different culture, but it doesn't help me.”

— Salma Hayek

“I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting ... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.”

— David Duchovny

“We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.”

— Ted Cruz

“I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“It is best if the guard is in love with America and wants to overawe the American by being a premium guard. This kind of guard thinks that he will encounter the American again one day in America, and that the American will offer to take him to a Chicago Bulls game, and buy him blue jeans and white
bread and delicate toilet paper. This guard dreams of speaking English
without an accent and obtaining a wife with an unmalleable bosom. This guard will confess that he does not love where he lives.
The other kind of guard is also in love with America, but he will hate the American for being an American. This is worst. This guard knows he will never go to America, and knows that he will never meet the American again. He will steal from the American, and terror the American, only to teach that he can.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

“I was raised speaking English and Spanish. And I also speak Danish. And I can get by in French and Italian. I've acted in Spanish and English, but when something has to do with emotions, sometimes I feel I can get to the heart of the matter better in Spanish.”

— Viggo Mortensen

“It was probably very difficult to go from Chinese and then suddenly go to kindergarten and start speaking English; it's very hard to transition back and forth when you are in that pivotal age. It's also hard to transition back, but if I was immersed in the country for a given amount of time, you are surrounded by it, everyone is speaking, you are learning new things, you are practicing all the time.”

— Lucy Liu

“There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the business of naming.In some cultures women keep their names, but in most their children take the father's name, and in the English-speaking world until very recently, prefaced by Mrs. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Bronte and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman's genealogy and even her existence.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“I found myself speaking more slowly (in an attempt to obey the Bible in speech), as if I was speaking French instead of English.”

— A.J. Jacobs

“We call it Albion. It is the English-speaking world. The one where they kill babies in the womb, right? And here I was hoping we'd be famous for the Moonshot, or democracy, or the Beatles, or something.”

— John C. Wright

“Welcome to Tartarus, the griffin said. The first time I'd arrived in Tartarus, I'd expected them to have screechy, high-pitched bird voices, and when they spoke in their own language to one another, it did sound like birds chirping, with the occasional low growl. But when speaking in a human tongue, they copied the accent of the language and spoke in a much lower humanlike tone, which gave the slightly weird side effect of them all having British accents when they spoke English.”

— Steve McHugh

“Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the "left" opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the "country" mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.”

— Bernard Bailyn

“I am a Mexican that has been lucky enough to travel the world, speaking English, but with a heart that speaks a universal language.”

— Cesar Millan

“The security and happiness of all minority groups in South Africa depend on the Afrikaner. Whether they are English- or German- or Portuguese- or Italian-speaking, or even Jewish-speaking, makes no difference.”

— P. W. Botha

“The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”

— John Rocker

“I grew up speaking English and Spanish. I grew up moving from country to country due to political, governmental, and social issues and just family atmosphere that wasn't right to bring up your kid in a country where there's a dictatorship or a communist type sense, so I incorporate that int music.”

— Cristian Machado

“We had probably our best ever Player of the Year Dance last week. You elected Dennis Wise as Player of the Year. Dennis accepted his award mimicking Vialli, whereupon Zola shouted 'Speak English', Dennis switched to his normal Cockney voice only for Zola to shout 'You're still not speaking English'.”

— Ken Bates

“I didn't know anything about fashion. I couldn't believe it when I got here. I don't know how I'm sitting here right now speaking English.”

— Adriana Lima

“Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world”

— Amy Tan

“There were a lot of unique challenges in producing the film, such as the logistical issues inherent in producing a long-term verite film in Pakistan, dealing with Urdu and Punjabi dialogue with an English-speaking editor and all the difficulties in recording, editing and clearing so many music tracks.”

— Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

“You can forgive your leaders for not knowing the intricacies of Islamic history. You cannot forgive them for not knowing their own. And when you look at American democracy, where did it start? It started, if you need to pick a point, at Runnymede in 1215. We have now been at this process, we and our English-speaking allies, for 800 years.”

— Michael Scheuer

“I do have very deep, fond memories of my family in Mexico City, but I also remember feeling funny for not speaking English - I was basically an immigrant. But I picked up the language fast and soon I knew that I wanted to be a writer.”

— Louis C.K.

“It is the English-speaking nations who, almost alone, keep alight the torch of Freedom.”

— Winston Churchill