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English Quotes

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English Quotes

“Уви, този „дивен руски език“, който ми се струваше, че все ме очаква някъде, цъфти като вярна пролет зад залостена здраво врата, за която от толкова години съм пазил ключа, се оказа несъществуващ и зад тази врата няма нищо освен овъглени пънове и есенна безнадеждна далнина, а ключът в ръката ми прилича по-скоро на шперц. (...) Движенията на тялото, гримасите, пейзажите, морните, дървета, ароматите, дъждовете, стапящите се и преливащите се оттенъци на природата, всичко нежно-човешко (колкото и да е чудно!), а също и всичко мъжкарско, грубо, сочно-цинично излиза на руски не по-зле, ако не и по-добре, отколкото на английски; но толкова присъщите на английския изтънчени недомлъвки, поезията на мисълта, мигновената искра между съвсем отвлечените понятия, ройването на едносрични епитети, всичко това, а също и всичко, що се отнася до техниката, модите, спорта, естествените науки и противоестествените страсти — на руски изглежда дървено, многословно и често отвратително в смисъл на стил и ритъм. Този разнобой отразява основната разлика в историческо отношение между зеления руски литературен език и зрелия като разпукнала се смокиня английски: между гениалния, но още недостатъчно образован, а понякога доста лишен от вкус младеж и мастития гений, който съчетава запасите от пъстро знание с пълната свобода на духа. Свободата на духа! Цялото дихание на човечеството се вмества в това съчетание от думи.”

LanguageEnglishRussianTranslating
Book:Lolita
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“विपद: सन्तु ता: शश्वत्तत्र तत्र जगद्गुरो। भवतो दर्शनं यत्स्यादपुनर्भवदर्शनम्॥८॥ Master of Universe I pray for calamities, So I do remember You ever constantly, Remembering You means freedom be, From cycle of births and death finally. - 201 -”

GodLordHinduismRhymeKrishnaEnglishHinduMisraMunindraStutiKunti
Book:Chants of Hindu Gods and Godesses in English Rhyme
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“॥दोहा॥ श्रीगुरु चरन सरोज रज, निज मनु मुकुरु सुधारि। बरनउँ रघुबर बिमल जसु, जो दायकु फल चारि॥ Doha With the dust of guru’s lotus feet having, I cleanse the mirror of my soul sparkling, Raghuvar’s spotless glory I be singing, The four fruits of life it ever is giving. - 303 -”

GodCulturePrayerHinduismGoddessRhymeEnglishHinduMisraChantsMunindraHanumanChalisa
Book:Chants of Hindu Gods and Godesses in English Rhyme
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“Shani Chalisa ॥दोहा॥ Doha जय-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 -”

GodPrayerWorshipHinduismGoddessRhymeEnglishHinduMisraChantsShaniChalisaDevaMunidra
Book:Chants of Hindu Gods and Godesses in English Rhyme
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“संकट मोचन हनुमानाष्टक मत्तगयन्द छन्द बाल समय रबि भक्षि लियो तब तीनहुँ लोक भयो अँधियारो। ताहि सों त्रास भयो जग को यह संकट काहु सों जात न टारो। देवन आनि करी बिनती तब छाँड़ि दियो रबि कष्ट निवारो। को नहिं जानत है जग में कपि संकटमोचन नाम तिहारो॥१॥ When as a child you lapped the sun, darkness on triple world fell, The worlds so got into trouble and a crisis that none could dispel, Gods then prayed to you to spare the sun and you did so quell, Who doesn’t know in this world your name `Problem Solver’ bells? - 294 -”

GodPrayerRhymeEnglishGoddessesMisraChantsMunindraHanumanHanumanashtakMochanSankat
Book:Chants of Hindu Gods and Godesses in English Rhyme
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“এক লেখকের পক্ষে দুই ভাষা নিয়ে খেলা করা আগুন নিয়ে খেলা করার মতন বিপজ্জনক, পরধর্ম ভয়াবহ, মাতৃভাষা ছাড়া অন্য ভাষায় সাহিত্য সৃষ্টি সত্যি অসম্ভব। অনেকে এ-কথায় আপত্তি তুলবেন, পৃথিবীতে এর ব্যতিক্রমও দু'-একজন আছেন, কিন্তু ব্যতিক্রম কখনও আদর্শ হতে পারে না। অন্য ভাষায় সার্থক রচনা সূত্রে জোসেফ কনরাডের নাম অনেকের রসনাগ্রে আসে, তিনি ব্যতিক্রমই, ইদানিং লোলিতা'র নোবোকভের কথাও বলা হয়, কিন্তু রুশ ভাষা ছেড়ে আমেরিকান ভাষা গ্রহণ করার পরে নোবোকভের স্বীকারোক্তি এই যে, তিনি রুশ ভাষা ছেড়ে দুঃখিত এবং সীমাবদ্ধ, তিনি হারিয়েছেন, "my natural idiom, my untrammelled rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English.”

EnglishNative LanguageFirst LanguageNobokov
Author:Sunil Gangopadhyay
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“Kiingereza kililetwa na wakoloni wa Kiingereza kutoka Uingereza na walikitumia katika masuala yote ya kiutawala ya Afrika Mashariki. Kililetwa pia na wamisionari waliojenga shule na kuwafundisha Kiingereza wanafunzi na walimu na watu wengine wa kawaida, kwa lengo la kuwasaidia katika kazi yao ya kueneza dini kama wakalimani, hivyo kufanya Kiingereza kienee zaidi kuliko Kiswahili.”

EnglandEnglishEast AfricaSwahiliKiswahiliAfrika MasharikiUingerezaKiingerezaEnglish ColonistsWakoloni Wa Kiingereza
Author:Enock Maregesi
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“Carlyle's genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Balliol, we believe that 'no English writer has done more to elevate and purify our ideas of life and to make us conscious that the things of the spirit are real, and that in the last resort there is no other reality.”

RealityGeniusMaterialismEnglishPurifyThomas CarlyleCarlyle
Book:Thomas Carlyle Famous Scots Series
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“Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce.”

ParisEssaysFrenchEnglishSnobberyMarcel ProustRevisionismFrench People1981In Search Of Lost TimeJohn RuskinBen SonnenbergGrand Street MagazineTerence Kilmartin
Book:Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
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“Finally, I would like to point out that now in the age of English, choosing a language policy is not the exclusive concern of non-English-speaking nations. It is also a concern for English-speaking nations, where, to realize the world’s diversity and gain the humility that is proper to any human being, people need to learn a foreign language as a matter of course. Acquiring a foreign language should be a universal requirement of compulsory education. Furthermore, English expressions used in international conferences should be regulated and standardized to some extent. Native English speakers need to know that to foreigners, Latinate vocabulary is easier to understand than what to the native speakers is easy, child-friendly language. At international conferences, telling jokes that none but native speakers can comprehend is inappropriate, even if fun. If native speakers of English – those who enjoy the privilege of having their mother tongue as the universal language – would not wait for others to protest but would take steps to regulate themselves, what respect they would earn from the rest of the world! If that is too much to ask, the rest of the world would appreciate it if they would at least be aware of their privileged position – and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to be come a universal language used in every corner of the world English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language. If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes. Perhaps some of them might then begin to think that the truly blessed are not they themselves, but those who are eternally condemned to reflect on language, eternally condemned to marvel at the richness of the world.”

LanguageEnglish LanguageEnglishLinguisticsUniversal LanguageGlobal LanguageEnglish Language ImperialismLinguistic Imperialism
Book:The Fall of Language in the Age of English
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“Every person of intelligence should be able to use his mother tongue correctly. It only requires a little pains, a little care, a little study to enable one to do so, and the recompense is great. Consider the contrast between the well-bred, polite man who knows how to choose and use his words correctly and the underbred, vulgar boor, whose language grates upon the ear and jars the sensitiveness of the finer feelings. The blunders of the latter, his infringement of all the canons of grammar, his absurdities and monstrosities of language , make his very presence a pain, and one is glad to escape from his company. The proper grammatical formation of the English language , so that one may acquit himself as a correct conversationalist in the best society or be able to write and express his thoughts and ideas upon paper in the right manner, may be acquired in a few lessons.”

IntelligencePolitenessSpeakingEnglishWell Bred
Book:How to Speak and Write Correctly
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“Anyone watching her would have thought her cold, indifferent, but this was the only way she knew to tackle her deepest troubles, to shoo them aside as if they were a cloud of summer gnats, and deal with the task at hand brusquely and efficiently. Hannah always thought of it as her mother's Englishness, that ability to equalize problems so that a scuffed shoe and an impending disaster were almost equally distasteful, but both were born with aplomb.”

ElegantEnglishRegal
Book:Love by the Morning Star
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“Correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies. Gentlemen and ladies had good table manners and spoke and wrote grammatically. It was what identified one with the upper classes. In Montana, however, it didn’t have this effect at all. It identified one, instead, as a stuck-up Eastern ass.”

WritingGrammarEnglishMontanaRules Of English Language
Book:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
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“This book collects the experience of my trip to Nepal, an unforgettable journey that allows you to see the world with different eyes.An itinerary started and ended in Kathmandu, accompanied for most of the journey by the local guide Mahesh who, in addition to giving me information on the places, also spoke to me about the history of the country and the divinities.I was able to admire extraordinary places from Pokhara to Dhulikel, visiting Buddhist monasteries and sacred places, but also seeing the devastation of the earthquake in Bhaktapur.The book was created as a sort of guide-diary (with some photos too), narrating my feelings and the places I visited, without neglecting some small curiosity and a tragicomic event that happened to me.”

TravelAsiaEnglishNepalNepali WritersTravel Guide
Book:Nepal, between spirituality and culture: Twelve days in the land of the great peaks
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“People speak broken Swahili on purpose. Business people for instance will speak Sheng – a mixture of Swahili and English – because that’s what people want to hear. And what is the government doing? They speak broken Swahili most of the time. Swahili is getting lost and I am really sorry for the future generations.”

PeopleGovernmentPurposeLostSpeakBusinessSorryEnglishHearFuture GenerationsSwahiliBusiness PeopleShengBroken Swahili
Author:Enock Maregesi
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“The neglected pioneer of one revolution, the honoured victim of another, brave to the point of folly, and as humane as he was brave, no man in his generation preached republican virtue in better English, nor lived it with a finer disregard of self. {On American founding father and hero, Thomas Paine}”

VirtueRevolutionHonorVictimBraveSelflessnessHumaneEnglishPainePioneerThomas PaineTom PaineFounding Father
Book:Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle
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“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don't like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that's why it flourishes.”

LanguageEnglishLinguisticsLanguage Evolution
Book:Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
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“After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that "Lolita" was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses -- the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions -- which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.”

HeritageEnglishRussianAfterword
Book:Lolita
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