Ordinary English

Famous quotes containing the words ordinary and/or english:

“He was not in the least a rhetorician, was not talking to Buncombe or his constituents anywhere, had no need to invent anything but to tell the simple truth, and communicate his own resolution; therefore he appeared incomparably strong, and eloquence in Congress and elsewhere seemed to me at a discount. It was like the speeches of Cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.”
—Derek Walcott (b. 1930)