Grammar For Quotes

#1. Are your ellipses (...) implying something significant or do you just enjoy abusing grammar for no reason?

Whitney G.

#2. I 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 Russell

#3. In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics.

Ferdinand De Saussure

#4. When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.

King Samuel Benson

#5. Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation.

Lynne Truss

#6. The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well-acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on - these things obviously evolved.

Daniel Tammet

#7. What's strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature.

Francine Prose

#8. Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.

Noam Chomsky

#9. Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

John McWhorter

#10. I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read.

Margaret Atwood

#11. Grammar, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

Ambrose Bierce

#12. The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, a general preparation for whatever the student may afterward choose for more particular application. The power of drawing, modeling, and using colors, is very properly called the language of the art.

Joshua Reynolds

#13. Take what the British call the "greengrocer's apostrophe," named for aberrant signs advertising cauliflower's or carrot's in local fruit and vegetable shops.

Naomi S. Baron

#14. Whatever they do, criminals and non-criminals act in particular ways. Some writers, for instance, use computers, others pen and paper. Some write in the morning, some at night. Each writer has a distinct style, with variations in grammar, sentence structure, and voice.

Ronald Kessler

#15. All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind - the culture - has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

Annie Dillard

#16. The chief characteristic of English grammar is the way words are arranged within sentences, and the technical term for this process is syntax. It

David Crystal

#17. I don't underestimate audiences' intelligence. Audiences are much brighter than media gives them credit for. When people went to a movie once a week in the 1930s and that was their only exposure to media, you were required to do a different grammar.

Michael Mann

#18. Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

Gilles Deleuze

#19. There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knolwedge, Grammatica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

Henry David Thoreau

#20. For grammar it [poetry] might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man shoult be put to school to learn his mother-tongue.

Philip Sidney

#21. Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it's the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. Besides, all those simple sentences worked for Hemingway, didn't they? Even when he was drunk on his ass, he was a fucking genius.

Stephen King

#22. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#23. A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

Ben Marcus

#24. Grammar is the breathing power for the life of language

Munia Khan

#25. I was a little excited but mostly blorft. "Blorft" is an adjective I just made up that means 'Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.' I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.

Tina Fey

#26. His sentences didn't seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action.

Jennifer Crusie

#27. Pidgin, pidgin everywhere. A peculiarity of dropping the connective, the article, of translating literally, of using present for past, present for future. We Filipinos did not speak pidgin. Our English was straight from the grammar texts.

Gilda Cordero-Fernando

#28. Asking for better grammar is inflammatory in the school," says an occasional T.A. "You have to give an A or you're a racist.

Anonymous

#29. The secret of happiness lies in the lifestyle of a child who lives in present; past and future are only the grammar thing for him.

Ankit Rawat

#30. We stayed like that, him watching me crying, for as long as we could stand it. Then he took a couple of paces away. The room needed a window for him to go to and look out of. I could feel the grammar of the moment demanding it.

Glen Duncan

#31. the painter had no need for grammar.
words fell from his brushes
already knowing where to stand, sit, lie down.

Thomas Lloyd Qualls

#32. Sometimes we think videogames are just games for kids, and then once they get out of grammar school or high school, they never play again, but that's when they really start playing.

John Madden

#33. ...why, when people write words do they capitalize "I"? Why not capitalize "You" too? For You are as important as I am. It's hard for me to understand the human ways.

Kate McGahan

#34. The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

Noam Chomsky

#35. American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar (a British advertising man with a proper education can make magazine copy for ribbed condoms sound like the Magna goddam Carta), but it has its own scruffy charm

Stephen King

#36. I had really good English teachers in elementary through high school. Not only were we required to read a lot - which is the best training for writing - we were drilled on grammar every day, every night. I hated the drill part, but I don't dangle my participles too often.

Carol Berg

#37. For example, from nouns to verbs to aspects of grammar, we each store language in different areas, recruiting different regions for different components.

John Medina

#38. I won't lie!
Probably from books you have saw that I'm not good at English, probably because I don't live in such country which this language is important or let's say to be native. But as for now I can't do a lot of for that!

Deyth Banger

#39. The public talk colloquially, the public's grammar's not perfect. They kid around and I don't think they overly mark me down for that. They just see me as a normal guy.

John Key

#40. There's a certain visual grammar you've got to stick in. For example, if a character has just woken up, draw him in his pajamas with the bed a bit rumpled. Or if he's ill, draw little bottles with red crosses on that immediately communicate medicine, and a box of tissues.

Korky Paul

#41. Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical structures for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium is syntax, grammar and logical continuity, which together form the carrier-wave of plain sense within which its deeper meanings are broadcast.

Don Paterson

#42. In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

Beverly Cleary

#43. The reason that [Greek grammar is] good for you, of course, is that the depth of your preaching or teaching from the New Testament depends in large part on how well you handle the original Greek.

David Alan Black

#44. Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas
a whole grammar made of light, for words to hard to speak.

Jodi Picoult

#45. Grammar perfect books are for Ivy Leaguers in Ivory Towers. My book is a sandcastle built on the beach of usefullness.

Jonathan Heatt

#46. for those to whom Lynne Truss is a hero, everything from spelling convention to word choice to logic is, somehow, "grammar." And

Robert Lane Greene

#47. Just 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. Feynman

#48. Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory ... : 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too.

E.L. Doctorow

#49. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.

Jasper Fforde

#50. English doesn't borrow from other languages. english follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

James Nicoll

#51. A horse is a quadruped, and quadruped's latin for beast, as everybody that's gone through grammar knows, or else what's the use in having grammars at all?

Charles Dickens

#52. Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#53. Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life ...

Jane Hirshfield

#54. My dad was the manager at the 45,000-acre ranch, but he owned his own 1,200-acre ranch, and I owned four cattle that he gave to me when I graduated from grammar school, from the eighth grade. And those cows multiplied, and he kept track of them for years for me. And that was my herd.

Dave Brubeck

#55. At age 11 in 1960, I moved to an academic state secondary school, Harrow County Grammar School for Boys.

Paul Nurse

#56. I do not worry or even think of spelling, grammar, paragraphing, or punctuation (except periods) at this point ... In the early throes of an idea there is for me only grammar of the mind, which is a flow of thought, as natural and precise as the flow of a river to the sea.

Mary O'Neill

#57. Boyhood is distracted for years with precepts of grammar that are infinitely prolix, perplexed and obscure.

John Amos Comenius

#58. Preposition: An enormously versatile part of grammar, as in 'What made you pick this book I didn't want to be read to out of up for?'

Winston Churchill

#59. The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith's for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar.

Ali Smith

#60. Linguists are no different from any other people who spend more than nineteen hours a day pondering the complexities of grammar and its relationship to practically everything else in order to prove that language is so inordinately complicated that it is impossible in principle for people to talk.

Ronald W. Langacker

#61. What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

George Eliot

#62. A schoolchild should be taught grammar
for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.

E.B. White

#63. A barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name ... One of our tribe of great men who turn disease to commodity ... he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory.

John Quincy Adams

#64. Yet why must grammar be like a prison for the mind? Might not language be as a closet full of gowns? Of a generally similar cut, with a hole for the head and neck to pass, but filled with difference and a variety of trimmings so that we don't grow bored?

Danielle Dutton

#65. Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls "E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities" or

Robert Lane Greene

#66. I was sent to a school with bosses for teachers- no Twain, only cane; check your dick you harry, no Dickens either, No Tom Sawyers no David Copperfields only Webster, master it for grammar, the Wren with a dash of Martini-Drink deep.

Aporva Kala

#67. I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.

Red Smith

#68. Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to ... But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.

Thomas Jefferson

#69. I decided quickly that committing crimes against grammar was a hard limit for me.

Sophie Morgan

#70. Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.

A. N. Wilson

#71. It is the very reason-for-being of language and grammar that I
unhinge.

Antonin Artaud

#72. My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go.

Kate Atkinson

#73. My grammar school graduating class in 1941 had a little party for 13 or 14 year-old kids. [Trumpeter] King Kolax's band played for the party and Gene Ammons was playing tenor saxophone with the band. And that's when I said, "That's it!" Just like that, tunnelvision ever since.

Johnny Griffin

#74. And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: "Our language," she said, "is not spoken, but sung ... Not simply words ... and grammar ... but melody. It was hard ... thus ... to learn English ... this language of wood. For the people of your nation, Octavian, all speech is song.

M T Anderson

#75. Ever since my mother sent me to Saturday morning grammar classes when I was 7, I wanted to become a famous actor. I loved the idea of captivating an audience and moving them truly through performance, but more importantly being recognized and heavily lauded for that talent.

Jack Gleeson

#76. My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.

Edmund Hillary

#77. She herself was of the opinion that there would have been no need for a wish consultant if grammar had been taught properly in schools, so that mundanes could be trained to mean exactly what they said. Not wishing to be rude to her guest, however, she kept this opinion to herself.

P.B. Kerr

#78. Grammar is like the air: someone higher up might try to set rules for its use, but people won't necessarily follow them.

Haruki Murakami

#79. English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.

Bill Bryson

#80. Why no s for two deer,
but an s for two monkeys?
Brother Quang says
no one knows.
So much for rules!
Whoever invented English should be bitten by a snake.

Thanhha Lai

#81. What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.

Terry Jones

#82. The amount of money I would pay for people to stop fucking up grammar is only slightly lower than the amount I'd give to ensure I never have grammatical errors in the statements I make calling others out on their grammatical errors.

Jenny Lawson

#83. It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn't inhibit the creative flow. When I was at school there was a huge focus on copying and testing and it put me off words and stories for years.

Michael Morpurgo

#84. It's really difficult for me. Language, I am sorry that I haven't. I think I just always expected that you learn a word in place of a word and when I discovered how difficult the grammar was and learning that was very discouraging for me.

Bo Derek

#85. The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark ... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.

Jodi Picoult

#86. What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.

David Baker