有关英语美文摘抄大全

英语美文,即使用地道、优美的英语语言写的文章;英语美文赏析,则是在接触地道英语语言的基础之上,了解和理解英语语言文化背景,欣赏语言确切应用所表达的真实情景。本文是有关英语美文，希望对大家有帮助!

有关英语美文：A big effort to make it a happy birthday

I like birthdays. I like fuss(大惊小怪) , a grand gesture. X can't understand the fuss. It's about upbringing, I think: his parents unceremoniously hand him something – not even wrapped – at some point within a few months of the date. I'm fairly sure they don't know when it is. For me, birthdays mean surprises, parties, over-excited children blowing out candles on sponge cakes. Like pencil marks on the wall, they are the backbone around which you hang family rituals. Birthdays are also a way to make up for the failings – perceived or real – of the past 12 months.

We didn't have the stomach for the last round. Absorbed in our own misery, X and I lumped the boys' birthday parties together, a swiftly expedited(加快，派出) afternoon in a soft-play centre, a swiss roll with candles. It's hardly the stuff of misery memoirs, but it made me sad.

Now a year has passed and birthday season is upon us, for the first time as a separated family. The boys' birthdays are close together and it feels like a milestone; I want to do it right. On top of my normal birthday fixation, I know the last weeks have been very hard for the children. I am scarcely mother of the year at the moment: I have made no headway in trying to find a new job, which scares me stupid, and am still bruised and shocked from the accident. My temper is short and I cry a lot. I've seen a naked look of worry in the eldest's eyes and felt powerless to make it go away.

It's the youngest's birthday first. He takes after his father in this: he's not really bothered. He likes presents, of course, but doesn't have my – or his brother's –need to turn the day into a Busby Berkeley musical with a firework finale(结局) . Even so, I am determined to do it properly, to crank out(制成) the old family rituals and create new ones. He'll be at X's on the morning of his birthday, mine in the evening. We've said we'll have dinner together, agreed who should get him which present.

In preparation for the big day, I bring out the stalwart Women's Weekly cake book and canvass his opinion. "So which cake would you like? A robot? A train? A spider? I don't think I'd be very good at the castle but I'll give it a try."

He deflates my ambitions. "I just want a plain square one."

"Are you sure? That's easy. With sweets on it?"

He purses his lips in thought. "Ok." I think he's humouring me. I prod him further, and he chooses something for his birthday dinner, something he has every week. I rather admire how matter of fact he is. He's one of those children that asks for a calculator and a toothbrush for Christmas.

While he's at his father's, I make a square cake. I sneak his age on to the top in Smarties, then make another for school, with chocolate fudge icing. I wrap his presents and write his card. It's very quiet in the empty house and I don't have to hide the cake in a cupboard, or issue dire "Don't come into my bedroom!" warnings. There's no sense of anticipation, and I don't like it. It's even worse in the morning, the first time in years I haven't been woken at five on a birthday morning by an over-excited child. I don't want to do this again, I think, as I take the foil wrapped cake up the road to school.

The evening is better. I collect the boys from school and he opens his presents. Later, X comes round and builds some Lego while I make the requested boring dinner. We eat and then we light the candles, blow them out, take the obligatory(义务的) pictures. The youngest is smiling his small, careful smile in them. It feels like a birthday, at last. We both need to be there, it turns out: after all, we both made him.

We'll know for next time.

有关英语美文：生活像杯中的咖啡

A group of graduates got together to visit their old university professor.

The conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and a variety of cups—porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain-looking, some expensive, some exquisite(精致的)—telling them to help themselves to the coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said,

"If you have noticed, all the nice-looking expensive cups have been taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. "

"Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. "

"What all of you really want is coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups... And then you began eyeing each other's cups.

"Now consider this: Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of life we live. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee. Savor the coffee, not the cups! Don't let the cups drive you ... enjoy the coffee instead."

有关英语美文：The Long Goodbye

"They grow up too soon," everyone told me. Eighteen years later, I finally understand what they meant.

It's nearly the end of summer break and my son goes out with friends. Ten minutes after he leaves home, I receive his text: Here. It's the same message I've received hundreds of times before -- our agreed-upon shorthand to reassure me, and probably him, in some still-unexamined way, that he has arrived safely at his destination. In a matter of days he'll head to college, and this routine, along with many others that have framed our days and nights, will come to an end. Reading that text triggers images stored safely away in my memory, a tiny flip book of our lives together.

My constant companion of nine months emerges with his eyes wide open. He's placed on my chest. I feel his heartbeat reverberating(回弹，反射) through mine. All I see are beginnings. Friends who visit caution that time is elusive(难懂的) , that he'll grow up faster than I can imagine, and to savor every moment. But I can't hear them; it's all too clichéd and my child has only just arrived. He's intoxicating: the beautiful bracelet-like creases in his wrists, the way he sounds like a little lamb when he cries. I'm filled with a renewed sense of purpose, of hope, of love. The first few months after he's born are topsy-turvy -- day is night, night is day. When sleep finally returns, so does work. My business suit is tight, my mind preoccupied. I pump milk in a cold, gray bathroom stall.

His teeth begin to appear. Baby bottles give way to solid foods. He points high above his chair to the clock on the wall. "Clock," he says. It's his first word, minus the "l," and it makes me laugh. Soon he is walking, skipping, making angels in the snow.

I'm promoted at work. It becomes harder to find the time to make playdates(上映期) and pediatrician(儿科医师) appointments. At lunch I read books about nurturing, teaching, inspiring your child. He calls my office with the help of his babysitter. "Momma," he says, "I'm making you a present."

The tooth fairy arrives and leaves him handwritten notes. He discovers knock-knock jokes and learns how to add, subtract, and read. He builds giant castles with giant Legos, rides his shiny bike down a country road with his feet off the pedals.

I quit my job to do freelance writing -- everything from training programs to marketing brochures(小册子) to essays - usually when the rest of the family is sleeping. There's never enough money, but now at least we have time.

Saturday nights are always family nights, spent at home. There are countless sporting events. He tries baseball, soccer, and track, then falls head over heels for basketball. He swings from tree limbs, wears superhero costumes, develops crushes, friendships, and fevers.

I volunteer at his school: cut, paste, read, nourish, fund-raise, chaperone. I like this job.

There are marathon bedtime story rituals, endless questions about how things work, and monsters under the bed. Lego pieces grow smaller and castles more intricate. He tries the guitar, plays the trombone, saves quarters to buy video games, and collects trading cards, which he keeps in a shoe box under his bed.

We get a dog. He loves this dog with all his heart. The dog loves him back.

One day his height surpasses mine and, seemingly the next, his father's.

He reads an essay by a sportswriter. It lights a fire in him. He starts to write his own stuff, wandering into my office as I try to juggle(杂耍，欺骗) freelance assignments.

I feel privileged to read his work.

Orthodontics are removed to reveal straight pearly whites. He earns his first paycheck as a baseball referee(裁判员) but wishes that it had been as a writer.

He learns to do the laundry, scrub the bathroom, and make pasta, though he often professes to forget how to do all three.

He turns 18.

On a cold and rainy Election Day we head out together to vote. After two hours waiting in line, he's the only teen in sight. It's not lost on him -- by the next morning he has written all about it.

He gets a job as a blogger, then starts his own website. And all the while there are macroeconomics(宏观经济学) , physics, and college applications.

The flip book's down to its last pages.

I've defined myself as a mother for 18 years. Who am I now? I look in the mirror. In my quest to help him grow wings, I forgot to grow some of my own. Can I find a new sense of purpose, rechannel the love?

Before I was a mother I was a daughter, infused with energy and the unspoken reassurance that my parents would always be there. But I can't be a daughter again. I'm on my own.

Does purpose -- mine, yours, anyone's -- require someone to nurture it, or is it inherent in all of us?

I'll soon be putting these competing theories to the test.

As I sit down to write this piece, I receive his text: Where are you?

Here, I text back.

For now.