優美英文美文欣賞集錦
英語美文閱讀融入語言學習中,能有效地影響大學生的精神世界,使他們在提高語言能力的基礎上,辯證地看世界,內化人文素養。下面是本站小編帶來的優美英文美文欣賞，歡迎閱讀!
A Plate of Peas
一盤豌豆
My grandfather died when I was a small boy, and my grandmother started staying with us for about six months every year. She lived in a room that doubled as my father's office, which we referred to as "the back room." She carried with her a powerful aroma. I don't know what kind of perfume she used, but it was the double-barreled, ninety-proof, knockdown, render-the-victim-unconscious, moose-killing variety. She kept it in a huge atomizer and applied it frequently and liberally. It was almost impossible to go into her room and remain breathing for any length of time. When she would leave the house to go spend six months with my Aunt Lillian, my mother and sisters would throw open all the windows, strip the bed, and take out the curtains and rugs. Then they would spend several days washing and airing things out, trying frantically to make the pungent odor go away.
在我還是個小孩的時候，我的外公去世了。自那以後，外婆每年裏有 6 個月跟着我們過。她 的房間是我父親辦公室的兩倍大，被我們稱作“裏屋” 。她身上總帶着濃郁的香氣;我不知道 她用的是哪種香水，但這種香水的味道非常地強烈，刺鼻、令人窒息，簡直能把人薰暈，把 駝鹿薰死。外婆將它裝在一個巨大的噴瓶裏，並經常頻繁地噴灑。要走進她的房間，保持正 常呼吸幾乎是不可能的。當她離開去莉蓮姨媽家住另外 6 個月的時候，媽媽和姐姐們總會迫 不及待地打開所有的窗戶、拆開被子、取下窗簾和地毯。接着的幾天裏，她們就一直在洗東 西、晾東西，傾盡全力地趨散那種刺鼻的氣味。
This, then, was my grandmother at the time of the infamous pea incident.
就在奶奶住在我們家時發生了豌豆事件，一件讓我恥辱的事。
It took place at the Biltmore Hotel, which, to my eight-year-old mind, was just about the fancies place to eat in all of Providence. My grandmother, my mother, and I were having lunch after a morning spent shopping. I grandly ordered a Salisbury steak, confident in the knowledge that beneath that fancy name was a good old hamburger with gravy. When brought to the table, it was accompanied by a plate of peas.
事情發生在比爾特摩飯店。在當時年僅 8 歲的我的眼裏，那是全普羅維登斯最好的飯店了。 一天，外婆、媽媽和我逛了一個上午的街，然後走進比爾特摩飯店吃午飯。我相當鄭重地點 了一道索里茲伯裏牛排，想當然地認爲在那考究的菜名後面是盤美味可口的牛排，上面還淋 着肉汁的那種。牛排被端上桌時，還伴着一盤豌豆。
I do not like peas now. I did not like peas then. I have always hated peas. It is a complete mystery to me why anyone would voluntarily eat peas. I did not eat them at home. I did not eat them at restaurants. And I certainly was not about to eat them now.
我不喜歡吃豌豆，當時也不喜歡。我從來都討厭吃豌豆。我真是不理解爲什麼有人會願意去 吃豌豆。在家我不會吃，在餐館我也不會吃，當時我也不準備吃。
"Eat your peas," my grandmother said.
“把豌豆吃了。 ”外婆說。
"Mother," said my mother in her warning voice. "He doesn't like peas. Leave him alone."
“媽， ”母親提醒外婆說， “他不喜歡吃豌豆，您就隨他吧! ”
My grandmother did not reply, but there was a glint in her eye and a grim set to her jaw that signaled she was not going to be thwarted. She leaned in my direction, looked me in the eye, and uttered the fateful words that changed my life: "I'll pay you five dollars if you eat those peas."
外婆沒有回答，但她眼睛冒光，下巴僵直，流露出一副不甘心挫敗的神情。她向我靠過來， 盯着我的眼睛，說了一句改變我一生的話： “你吃掉那些豌豆的話，我就給你 5美元。 ”
I had absolutely no idea of the impending doom. I only knew that five dollars was an enormous, nearly unimaginable amount of money, and as awful as peas were, only one plate of them stood between me and the possession of that five dollars. I began to force the wretched things down my throat.
我對即將發生的厄運一無所知，我只知道 5 美元是筆很大的一筆財富，可一盤豌豆成了攔路虎。儘管豌豆很難吃，可爲了拿到 5美金，我還是強迫自己往下嚥。
My mother was livid. My grandmother had that self-satisfied look of someone who has thrown down an unbeatable trump card. "I can do what I want, Ellen, and you can't stop me." My mother glared at her mother. She glared at me. No one can glare like my mother. If there were a glaring Olympics, she would undoubtedly win the gold medal.
我母親臉色鐵青，而外婆卻是一臉的得意洋洋，就像剛在牌桌上甩出殺手鐗一樣， “只要我想 要做的，我就能做到。埃倫，你是阻止不了我的。 ”我母親生氣地瞪着自己的母親，也瞪着我。 沒有人可以像我母親那樣瞪着眼睛，如果有個瞪眼奧林匹克比賽的話，她一定能拿金牌回來。
I, of course, kept shoving peas down my throat. The glares made me nervous, and every single pea made me want to throw up, but the magical image of that five dollars floated before me, and I finally gagged down every last one of them. My grandmother handed me the five dollars with a flourish. My mother continued to glare in silence. And the episode ended. Or so I thought.
當然了，當時我還在往自己喉嚨塞豌豆。憤怒的目光讓我緊張，每顆豆子都讓我想吐，可 5 美元那美妙的影子一直在我眼前飄浮。終於，我嚥下了最後一顆豆子。外婆很誇張地遞給我 5 美元，母親還在沉默地怒視着。總算告一段落了!至少當時我是那麼認爲的。
My grandmother left for Aunt Lillian's a few weeks later. That night, at dinner, my mother served two of my all-time favorite foods, meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Along with them came a big, steaming bowl of peas. She offered me some peas, and I, in the very last moments of my innocent youth, declined. My mother fixed me with a cold eye as she heaped a huge pile of peas onto my plate. Then came the words that were to haunt me for years.
幾周後，外婆去了莉蓮姨媽家。一天晚飯時，母親做了兩道我一直最喜歡吃的菜——肉餅和 土豆泥。和它們一起的，還有一大碗熱氣騰騰的豌豆。她給了我一些，而我拒絕了，那也正 是我純真時代終結的一刻。母親冷冰冰地看着我，一邊向我的盤子里加了一大堆的豌豆。而 後從她口裏說出的話，縈繞在我心裏，好多年都沒有散去。
"You ate them for money," she said. "You can eat them for love."
“你可以爲錢吃了它們， ”她說， “你就可以爲愛吃了它們。 ”
Oh, despair! Oh, devastation! Now, too late, came the dawning realization that I had unwittingly damned myself to a hell from which there was no escape.
哦，天哪!哦，太慘了!事到如今，我才頓悟：不知不覺中，我已將自己推進萬劫不復的地獄，但一切爲時已晚。
"You ate them for money. You can eat them for love."
“你可以爲錢吃了它們，就可以爲愛吃了它們。 ”
What possible argument could I muster against that? There was none. Did I eat the peas? You bet I did. I ate them that day and every other time they were served thereafter. The five dollars were quickly spent. My grandmother passed away a few years later. But the legacy of the peas lived on, as it lives on to this day. If I so much as curl my lip when they are served (because, after all, I still hate the horrid little things), my mother repeats the dreaded words one more time: "You ate them for money," she says. "You can eat them for love."
我能有什麼樣的理由來反駁呢?沒有!我無話可說。那後來我吃了沒有呢?當然，我吃了。 在那一晚，我吃了。之後每次上豌豆的時候，我都吃了。5美元很快就被花掉了，外婆也在幾 年後過世，而豌豆事件的影響卻一直還在，直到如今。如果我看到豌豆就撅嘴的話(因爲， 無論如何，我仍然憎惡這些討厭的小東西) ，母親就會又一次重複那令我畏懼的話： “你可以 爲錢吃了它們， ”她說， “就可以爲愛吃了它們。 ”
優美英文美文欣賞篇二Never Judge a Book by Its Cover
A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in a homespun threadbare suit, stepped off the train in Boston, and walked timidly without an appointment into the president of Harvard’s outer office secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods country folk had not business at Harvard, and probably didn’t even deserve to be in Cambridge frowned. ”We want to see the president,” the man said softly.” He’ll be busy all day,” the secretary snapped.” We’ll wait,” the lady replied. For hours, the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would finally become discouraged and go away. They didn’t. And the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president. ”Maybe if they just see you for a few minutes, they’ll leave,” she told him. He signed in exasperation and nodded. Someone of his importance obviously didn’t have the time to spend with nobodies, but he detested gingham and homespun suits cluttering his office.
The president, stern-faced with dignity, strutted toward the couple lady told him, ”We had a son that attended Harvard for one year loved Harvard, and was very happy here. But he was accidentally killed. And my husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him somewhere on campus. ”The president wasn’t touched, and she was shocked, ”Madam,” he said gruffly, ”we can’t put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died, this place would look like a cemetery.
“Oh, no“ the lady explained quickly, “we don’t want to erect a statue thought we would give a building to Harvard.” The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dress and homespun suit, and then exclaimed, ”A building! Do you have and earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical plant at Harvard.
For a moment the lady was silent. The president was pleased could get rid of them now. The lady turned to her husband and said quietly.” Is that all it costs to start a university?” Her husband nodded president’s face wilted in confusion and bewilderment. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford walked away, traveling to Palo Alto, California where they established the university that bears their name -------a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.
You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them.
優美英文美文欣賞篇三Run, Patti, Run!
Mark V. Hansen
At a young and tender age, Patti Wilson was told by her doctor that she was an epileptic. Her father, Jim Wilson, is a morning jogger. One day she smiled through her braces and said, "Daddy what I'd really love to do is running with you every day, but I'm afraid I'll have a seizure." Her father told her, "If you do, I know how to handle it, so let's start running!"
That's just what they did every day. It was a wonderful experience for them to share and there were no seizures at all while she was running. After a few weeks, she told her father, "Daddy, what I'd really love to do is break the world's long-distance running record for women."
Her father checked the Guiness Book of World Records and found that the farthest any woman had run was 80 miles. As a freshman in high school, Patti announced, "I'm going to run from Orange County up to San Francisco." (A distance of 400 miles.) "As a sophomore," she went on, "I'm going to run to Portland, Oregon." (Over 1500 miles.) "As a junior I'll run to St. Louis." (About 2000 miles) "As a senior I'll run to the White House." (More than 3000 miles away.) In view of her handicap, Patti was as ambitious as she was enthusiastic, but she said she looked at the handicap of being an epileptic as simply "an inconvenience." She focused not on what she had lost, but on what she had left.
That year, she completed her run to San Francisco wearing a T-shirt that read, "I Love Epileptics." Her dad ran every mile at her side, and her mom, a nurse, followed in a motor home behind them in case anything went wrong. In her sophomore year, Patti's classmates got behind her. They built a giant poster that read, "Run, Patti, Run!" (This has since become her motto and the title of a book she has written.) On her second marathon, en route to Portland, she fractured a bone in her foot. A doctor told her she had to stop her run. He said, "I've got to put a cast on your ankle so that you don't sustain permanent damage."
"Doc, you don't understand," she said. "This isn't just a whim of mine, it's a magnificent obsession! I'm not just doing it for me, I'm doing it to break the chains on the brains that limit so many others. Isn't there a way I can keep running?" He gave her one option. He could wrap it in adhesive instead of putting it in a cast. He warned her that it would be incredibly painful, and he told her, "It will blister." She told the doctor to wrap it up. She finished the run to Portland, completing her last mile with the governor of Oregon. You may have seen the headlines: "Super Runner, Patti Wilson Ends Marathon For Epilepsy On Her 17th Birthday."
After four months of almost continuous running from West Coast to the East Coast, Patti arrived in Washington and shook the hand of the President of United States. She told him, "I wanted people to know that epileptics are normal human beings with normal lives."
I told this story at one of my seminars not long ago, and afterward a big teary-eyed man came up to me, stuck out his big meaty hand and said, "Mark, my name is Jim Wilson. You were talking about my daughter, Patti." Because of her noble efforts, he told me, enough money had been raised to open up 19 multi-million-dollar epileptic centers around the country.
If Patti Wilson can do so much with so little, what can you do to outperform yourself in a state of total wellness?
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