Grammatical Quotes

#1. The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.

George Edward Woodberry

#2. Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears ...

Jack Kerouac

#3. The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#4. The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

B.F. Skinner

#5. Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending - sit down.

Winston Churchill

#6. It's amazing, the increase in grammatical errors in proportion to the level of hatred in the content of hate mail.

Christina Engela

#7. To the world's most perfect woman. It was lucky my father was not present. Perfect is an absolute that cannot be modified, like unique or pregnant. My love for Rosie was so powerful that it had caused my brain to make a grammatical error.

Graeme Simsion

#8. One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one's native language in conversation and in reading or one does not. What Sophomore English does (or tries to do) is little more than the naming of parts.

Stephen King

#9. People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#10. If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.

E.B. White

#11. I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.

Brian P. Cleary

#12. The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#13. When a grammatical construction is associated with politicians you can be sure that it provides a way to evade responsibility. Zombie nouns, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That

Steven Pinker

#14. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story ... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

Stephen King

#15. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition,

Jack Kerouac

#16. And last but not least, reflecting my feelings on proofreading ... excuse any pages on my websites that have misspelled words or grammatical errors ... I'm not a proofreader of any great merit.

Mark Twain

#17. French and German illustrate the misleading character of apparent grammatical simplicity just as well.

Edward Sapir

#18. Our speech has its weaknesses and its defects, like all the rest. Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.

Michel De Montaigne

#19. If there are spelling and grammatical errors, assume that the same level of attention to detail probably went into the gathering and reporting of the "facts" given on the site.

Randolph Hock

#20. Speech and prose are not the same thing. They have different wave-lengths, for speech moves at the speed of light, where prose moves at the speed of the alphabet, and must be consecutive and grammatical and word-perfect. Prose cannot gesticulate. Speech can sometimes do nothing more.

James Kenneth Stephen

#21. Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression

Amos Bronson Alcott

#22. First and foremost, I'm an oral storyteller - I'll make a poetic choice over a grammatical choice every single time.

Isobelle Carmody

#23. Free voluntary reading results in better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development

Stephen D. Krashen

#24. We had a humiliating and lengthy wait at a DONT WALK sign with not a car in sight for miles. Dad was a press about jaywalking. Or maybe he just like to stare down what he'd testily called the "grammatical error sanctioned by the state." There is, of course, no apostrophe in the DONT WALK sign.

Deb Caletti

#25. What an idea--that with a few words you could catch another person in a little grammatical clutch, arrange the objects of the world such that they bordered the two of you.

Rebecca Lee

#26. Evil is simply
a grammatical error:
a failure to leap
the precipice
between "he"
and "I.

Linda Pastan

#27. The question is whether distinct cognitive structures can be identified, which interact in the real use of language and linguistic judgments, the grammatical system being one of these. Certainly,

Noam Chomsky

#28. Certain grammatical rules are arbitrary, but the need to have these arbitrary rules is not arbitrary.

Douglas Wilson

#29. Lovemaking is a big grammatical error, i think it should be, LustMaking.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#30. It is high time we turned to Grammar now," said Doctor Cornelius, in a loud voice. "Will your Royal Highness be pleased to open Pulverulentus Siccus at the fourth page of his 'Grammatical Garden or the Arbour of Accidence pleasantlie open'd to Tender Wits?

C.S. Lewis

#31. Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story ... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

Stephen King

#32. As a young writer, I learned a lot about grammatical structure from reading plays, from performing the plays. I think that was a wonderful apprenticeship.

Jennifer Haigh

#33. What Mach calls a thought experiment is of course not an experiment at all. At bottom it is a grammatical investigation.

Ernst Mach

#34. I'm glad I was cute and grammatical. I think you're cute and grammatical, too.

Becky Albertalli

#35. starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.

Elena Ferrante

#36. The Internet lets women use words, which is their natural tool. Little girls speak in more complex, grammatical sentences than little boys do, and women never lose that superiority in verbal ability.

Helen Fisher

#37. I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.

Marie Brennan

#38. No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.

Edward Sapir

#39. I still have trouble identifying grammatical structures by name, though I know them as matters of usage.

Robertson Davies

#40. My, my, aren't we upper class and therefore faultlessly grammatical.

Sharon Green

#41. On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.

Lynne Truss

#42. The only man, woman, or child who ever wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.

E. E. Cummings

#43. The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical rules.

Judith Martin

#44. If you can avoid the grammatical bog of trying to wow English professors with your sentences, then you're well on your way to getting the reader to turn one page and then the next.

Scott Nicholson

#45. Does providing explicit grammatical information during receptive practice have an effect on L2 development?

Robert DeKeyser

#46. Our investigation is a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#47. You shouldn't start a sentence with 'however' unless you have a sentence stating something appropriate before, which would be the thing you're howevering. It's not grammatical. I should cut you.

Lotus Rose

#48. You cannot ... transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word "God" to be its grammatical subject.

Antony Flew

#49. Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.

W. Somerset Maugham

#50. The fact that [English] has shed most of the old grammatical forms which time has rendered useless and scarcely intelligible, has made English a model, pointing the way which must be followed in building the Interlanguage ...

Sylvia Pankhurst

#51. Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.

Edward Sapir

#52. Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.

Robert Anton Wilson

#53. There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.

Marshall McLuhan

#54. 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

#55. The elderly are spooky when they degenerate into
reflections of their younger selves. They say things that
make sense on some grammatical level, but it's not always
connected to reality.

Scott Adams

#56. To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations.

Octavio Paz

#57. The "I" is a grammatical fiction (Nietzsche). There are bundles of impressions but no underlying self (Hume). There is no survival because there is no person (Buddha, Parfit).

Max More

#58. There were grammatical errors even in his silence.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

#59. I'm glad your self-righteousness has given you some exercise, but you forget: we are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don't stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don't draw equations, our consciences don't have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us.

Josiah Bancroft

#60. 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

#61. The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of making an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it's fine.

Steven Pinker

#62. He ain't my friend,' Harry said. 'Not no more, he ain't.'
Strax leaned across to Jenny. 'At what age do these cubs become grammatical?' he demanded.
'Depends,' she told him. 'At what age do Sontarans become pacifists?

Justin Richards

#63. My husband and I speak an ancient language called grammatical English, and the kids speak a strange dialect which is difficult to decode because it is based on only four phrases: 'Huh,' 'I dunno,' 'It's not my turn,' and 'I do everything around here!

Teresa Bloomingdale