Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
I never show the back of my tongue. That is a Dutch expression.
Enthusiasm is a wonderful thing. In South America they throw flowers to you. In Greece Greeks throw themselves.
The emancipation of today displays itself mainly in cigarettes and shorts... painted lips and nails, and the return of trailing skirts and other absurdities of dress which betoken the slave-woman's intelligent companionship.
Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.
The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creators hand.
[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.
If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.
You have to be mad in the language you're mad in.
Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty; Greek three; and English simply one.
The amusements of broadcast consist mainly of songs, stories, and games, just as in tribal life. The songs and stories are mostly about courtship, the games mostly played by men, just as in tribal life.
When people say “clean as a whistle”, they forget that a whistle is full of spit.
Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.
American audiences tend to be more expressive than British ones.
The use of proverbs is characteristic of an unlettered people. They are invaluable treasures to dunces with good memories.
The Russians are very much more up and down than the French.
The analysis of laughter had opened to me points of contact between the fundamentals of a communal and disciplined emotional knowledge and those of discursive knowledge.
That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
I think jazz and comic books are probably the two uniquely American art forms.
That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.
I think Americans are very verbal and Aussies are more circumspect, and that can come across as being clearer. It can also come across as abrupt and cold. Some people find me to be abrupt and cold. That's just my personal style.
The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.
In our house, the name for all athletic shoes - any that weren't dress or 'church' shoes - was 'tennis shoes,' or 'tennies.'
