Popular quotes about Grammar! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most of it.
Charlton LairdI had someone correct my grammar once on a blind date, and within the first 10 minutes the date was over. You just don't correct somebody's grammar. That's just not okay. I'm from Tennessee, so I probably say everything wrong. I might have said ain't, or something like that.
Reese WitherspoonIt takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they "speak with the accent of natives" they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.
Ivan IllichThe American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax
Thomas PaineI can assure you that there is no question of us throwing away the tradition of the Grammar Schools.
Hugh GaitskellI demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
Louis AragonGrammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented.
Charlton LairdI begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense.
Mary Doria RussellIlliteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.
Mary McCarthyThere's no reason why you can't deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake.
Toby YoungI need geometry to set the grammar of the image expressive language . The structural skeleton, the composition and the geometric layout provide a perspective from which one can read the image; otherwise we would do what Dadaists did when they put words in a little bag and then took them out at random in order to compose a poem.
Augusto De LucaI never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.
Joan DidionThe thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.
Martin AmisMaybe it is only I, but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies.
Dorothy ParkerIn grammar school some of the girls had problems with me. My face was too light. My hair was too long. It was the black-consciousness period, and I felt really bad.
Whitney HoustonWhen I'm asked to define "Southern food," I usually turn that question back to my audience and ask them what they think. I hear responses like fried chicken, catfish, barbecue, collard greens, and sweet potatoes. These are excellent examples, because they are historically grounded. You can trace each dish back to the people who brought these food traditions to the South. Today, these foods are central to the core culinary grammar of the American South.
Marcie Cohen FerrisA Heart So White is simply one of the best novels I know. I'm also thrilled by Javier Marรญas sentences, by how elegant they are while also being so permissive in relation to the niceties of grammar and so open to the prospect of surprise. He's a genius.
Garth GreenwellA schoolchild should be taught grammarโfor the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.
E. B. WhiteMuddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.
Quentin CrispIf teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.
Ray BradburyIn grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!
Ron CarlsonAt age 11 in 1960, I moved to an academic state secondary school, Harrow County Grammar School for Boys.
Paul NurseThere is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
Anthony BurgessLanguages are fluffy big pillows stuffed between nations - what others say is muffled and nearly lost in them, and when we speak their grammar we get feathers in our mouth. It's worth it. What pleasure to phrase an idea, even in child's words, slowly, and sail it across the gulf in another language to a different-speaking human being!
Richard BachOur biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.
Margaret AtwoodLet your letter be written as accurately as you are able,--I mean with regard to language, grammar, and stops; for as to the matter of it the less trouble you give yourself the better it will be. Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.
Lord ChesterfieldSomething that had an enormous influence over my relationship with language was my stammer. I had a really bad stammer in my childhood and adolescence, and that imbues you with two things. First, a hyper-sensitivity to grammar, because a stammerer will have problematic sounds, impossible verbal stumbling blocks. Second, writing is just such a joy when you have a problem with speaking. It's so astonishing to watch language coming out of your pen without any hesitation or dysfluency.
Maggie O'FarrellThe new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scholars no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been lead quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term fourth dimension.
Guillaume ApollinaireSauces in cookery are like the first rudiments of grammar - the foundation of all languages.
Alexis SoyerJust as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.
Richard P. FeynmanThe truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a workaday world can but seldom afford.
Charlton LairdIn fact, by universal grammar I mean just that system of principles and structures that are the prerequisites for acquisition of language, and to which every language necessarily conforms.
Noam ChomskyIf grammar is medicine, then Roy Clark gives us the spoonful of sugar to help it go down. A wonderful tour through the labyrinth of language.
Anne HullAfter all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.
Thomas Wentworth HigginsonSexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
Adrienne RichWhy are they going to disappear him?' I don't know.' It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar.
Joseph HellerWhich is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.
Mark Twain