Top 100 Quotes About Grammar
#1. I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period.
Robert Burchfield
#2. What use to skip those two grades in grammar school and get such a jump on everybody else,
when the result is to wind up so far behind?
Philip Roth
#3. Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
Ferdinand De Saussure
#4. Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.
Terry Pratchett
#5. 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
#6. We learned the seven traditional ways to make words unclear."
"Seven? That many? Which was the most effective?"
"Poor grammar skills.
Lita Burke
#9. It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.
Fred Frith
#11. Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar.
Richard Mitchell
#12. That is the correct grammar, you know: her husband and me.
Gillian Flynn
#13. Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.
Quentin Crisp
#14. 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
#15. Ever since grammar school, I knew I wanted to be famous - I always wanted to be a singer.
Jennifer Hudson
#16. Plurality of languages: [ ... ] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.
Hannah Arendt
#18. Where have you been, Theodora?," Mrs Goodman asked.
"Walking, Mother."
"And whom did you see?"
Mrs Goodman flung her grammar like a stone.
"I did not see a cat," said Theodora.
Mrs Goodman looked at her daughter, who giggled before she left the room.
Patrick White
#19. All I know about grammar is its infinite power.
Joan Didion
#20. This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.
William Labov
#21. 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
#22. If rhetoric study was the military, grammar teachers would be the drill sergeants.
T.K. Naliaka
#23. Grammar snobs are a distinct breed from their gentle cousins: word nerds and grammar geeks. The difference is bloodlust.
June Casagrande
#24. Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.
F. Sionil Jose
#25. Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.
Mark Twain
#26. Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.
Jonathan Sacks
#27. Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest
Michel De Montaigne
#28. The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.
Val Kovalin
#29. 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
#30. Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
#31. The rules of grammar exist in large part to permit readers and writers to operate from a shared set of expectations.
Michael Crichton
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Logic is to grammar what the sense of words is to their sound.
Joseph Joubert
#35. Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.
Robert Graves
#36. My whole life as a grammar-school boy, getting to Cambridge University and working on the 'London Sunday Times' has been very aspirational.
Robert Lacey
#37. The opening of the first grammar school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.
James Russell Lowell
#38. I was a loner as a child and happiest at home, launching toy rockets and aeroplanes. When I started causing trouble in my third year at grammar school, Mum was really surprised. My parents sent me to a child psychologist, who suggested I might have Asperger's syndrome.
Gary Numan
#39. Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school.
William Shakespeare
#40. Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation
Robert Frost
#41. The course of a man's destiny can seem sharply altered by a sudden illumination. But illumination is no more than the Spirit's sudden vision of a road that is long prepared. Gradually I learned grammar. I practiced syntax. My feelings were awakened. Then a poem suddenly blazed in my heart.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#42. I think the prospect of bringing back grammar schools has always been wrong and I've never supported it. And I don't think any Conservative government would have done it.
David Cameron
#43. A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies
that have moulded them
Jawaharlal Nehru
#44. If something's public then it seems like the important thing is the person in that public. And the notion of rhetoric. I went to Jesuit schools that focused on first there's grammar, then there's rhetoric, and rhetoric's usually seen as a kind of degraded method, because you're trying to persuade.
Vito Acconci
#45. 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
#46. I 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 Aragon
#47. Great books are weighted and measured by their style and matter, and not the trimmings and shadings of their grammar.
Mark Twain
#48. ...And somewhere along the line in my literary career, I discovered the differences between grammar and grandpa, and write from wrong.
Dan Adams
#49. To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop.
Muriel Barbery
#50. The 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 Laird
#51. The wall between writing and painting is just good grammar.
Moderation in moderation.
Fun is scary with a happy ending.
Just love. If love doesn't transform that which annoys you, it will be easier to tolerate.
Emily Thornton Calvo
#52. Filmmaking in general is about feeling and not about theory. You need to know a lot of rules about filmmaking: character development, grammar, and all these thing, but then you use it instinctively. I ask myself this question all the time. I have no solid theory, I just do what I feel is right.
Hany Abu-Assad
#53. His eyes so dim, so wasted each limb, that, heedless of grammar, they all cried, that's him!
Richard Harris Barham
#54. God is logic's corpse, a wound in reason, grammar's empty skin.
Jamey Hecht
#55. And she rarely forgot that while her grammar and accent were above the town standard, she wore a plain cap, cooked the family dinner, and darned all the stockings.
George Eliot
#56. 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
#57. I'm a very honorable person. I have lifelong friends from birth, from grammar school, from five years old.
Tony Vlachos
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Why are they going to disappear him?'
I don't know.'
It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar.
Joseph Heller
#61. 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
#62. Muriel, my mother, was my main confidant. She was a teacher of English at Watford grammar school but took a break while my sister Madeleine and I were children. She held court in the kitchen, and we talked about everything.
John Sulston
#63. Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.
Dave Barry
#64. He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.
Jorge Luis Borges
#65. In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.
Will Schwalbe
#66. Going to a grammar school, you mixed with all sorts of different types and I used to listen to how they talked. When I did my imitations, I could sound like someone really rough, or I could sound like a cabinet minister.
Steve Coogan
#67. Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find?
Lemony Snicket
#68. Grammar is the breathing power for the life of language
Munia Khan
#69. Perfect grammar
persistent, continuous, sustained
is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.
Mark Twain
#71. Dangerous knowledge is often hidden under ponderous grammar and obscurantist vocabulary.
Brent Weeks
#72. Language corresponds only to itself. Intellectuals suffer from that. And once you begin to question language, you cannot stop at studying linguistics. Analytical philosophy becomes insufficient, artificial grammar becomes insufficient.
Martin Walser
#73. Reading and writing don't inevitably go together. You can read without learning a thing about writing, grammar, or spelling, although, you certainly can't learn anything about writing, grammar, or spelling unless you read.
Frank Smith
#74. No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar..
Richard Whately
#75. I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was ... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home.
Cormac McCarthy
#76. The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.
Constance Hale
#77. But the world, as a creation, is not a mere construction; it too is more than a syntax. It is a poem, which we are apt to forget when grammar takes exclusive hold of our minds.
Anonymous
#78. My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.
Sarah Waters
#79. There's nothing a well-regulated child hates so much as regularity. I believe a really healthy boy would thoroughly enjoy Greek Grammar
if only he might stand on his head to learn it!
Lewis Carroll
#80. I went to the local schools, the local state primary school, and then to the local grammar school. A secondary school, which technically was an independent school, it was not part of the state educational system.
John Hume
#81. Grammar A stratum of consciousness Leading to beauty
Muriel Barbery
#82. 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
#83. Being skilled in Catsism is like being a ninja only deadlier and not so silent. The only bad thing is the sickening grammar you have to use.
Will Advise
#84. Grammar to a writer is to a mountaineer a good pair of hiking boots or, more precisely, to a deep-sea diver an oxygen tank.
A.A. Patawaran
#85. Yes," she said. "'I Been Working on the Railroad.'There's just two things I'm worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.
Lorrie Moore
#86. The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini.
Swami Vivekananda
#87. Ladies, if you want to know the way to my heart ... good spelling and good grammar, good punctuation, capitalize only where you are supposed to capitalize, it's done.
John Mayer
#88. Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.
David Sedaris
#89. Ha-ha. The dumb jock who can't talk the Queen's English. I swear to God, the next person who corrects my grammar gets punched in the face.
Rick Yancey
#90. I have no idea what that is, but yawn, anyway, just on principle. Eat up. Pancakes is brain food.
Apparently not grammar food.
Wow.You college girls are mean.
Rachel Caine
#91. If you win a Super Bowl before you're fired, you're a genius, and everyone listens to you. But a coach is just a guy whose best class in grammar school was recess and whose best class in high school was P.E. I never thought I was anything but a guy whose best class was P.E.
John Madden
#92. Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.
Laura Kreitzer
#93. Given a choice of weapons with you sir, I should choose grammar.
Halliwell Hobbes
#94. We have in our head something called story grammar. We see the world as a series of episodes rather than logical propositions ... In our serious society, storytelling is seen as being soft. But people process the world through story.
Daniel H. Pink
#95. Grammar was the only place the girl could keep her father alive.
Anthony Marra
#96. I don't speak with proper grammar. I don't speak with dialogue attribution. I don't speak with quotation. I don't care about any of that stuff. It's about rhythm, and it's about what's in their [the character's] head, and what feels more natural. And it's about speed. I want things to move.
James Frey
#97. These things which are made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. 'Hooray! Welcome! You're here!', and in my case, 'You send so many and you come so rarely!'
Terence McKenna
#98. Then when I was in grammar school I played the clarinet, and then, after clarinet I played the flute in college orchestra - besides singing in the college chorus and things like that.
Bobby McFerrin
#99. Your grammar is a reflection of your image. Good or bad, you have made an impression. And like all impressions, you are in total control.
Jeffrey Gitomer
#100. Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the rules of grammar and the rules about appropriate speech in various situations.
Peter Farb
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