Grammar Quotes

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

~ Piero Scaruffi

Never underestimate the audacity of the small minded and slightly crapulous.A rather bleezed young neighbour decided to have a grammar battle with me. It lasted all of two seconds.I said something slightly amicable, and he responded with, “You sure that's how you use that word?”I put down my laundry basket and turned to him slowly and deliberately.“Do you really want to have this discussion with me, son, or do you want to go home and rethink your life?”He grumbled and vanished.

~ Michelle Franklin

Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.

~ Andrés Neuman

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant nothing would. No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.

~ Kelli Russell Agodon

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time.

~ Stephen Hawking

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

~ B.r. Myers

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

~ Ben Marcus

Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.

~ Vera Nazarian

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.

~ Richard Mitchell

Carmen's speciality is national news, and her greatest pleasure is finding inconsistencies in the declarations of politicians: syntactical errors, and – why not? – howlers. The one she has the most fun with is the mayor. Someone who can't speak shouldn't be in charge of a city, she's always saying. And, far from being elitist, her observation alludes to the obvious contempt a certain affluent social class – from which the mayor hails – feels for language (words, meaning, syntax, conjugation, use of prepositions, solipsisms) and which she, a secondary-teacher of language and literature for more than thirty years, refuses to countenance.

~ Claudia Piñeiro

The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it does involve an extra step, but even that isn't all that unusual. Welsh is like Shakespearean English on acid: the verb always - not just in questions - moves to the beginning. Alternatively, it can be viewed as taking the French grammar a step further. While the verb stops at tense in French, it moves further in Welsh to a position that traditional grammarians call the complementizer (don't ask).

~ Charles Yang

Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details?

~ Tina Fey

Grammarians make no new thoughts, but thoughts make new grammar.

~ Dagobert D. Runes

The best grammarian still can't write a verse.

~ Dagobert D. Runes

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: 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. (112)They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity?

~ Gilles Deleuze

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

~ Mark Twain

Sex is a matter of biology, while gender is a matter of grammar, and there is no earthly reason why sex should be involved in gender distinctions.

~ R.l. Trask

Whenever I write a paragraph in English, I first check it with the Google Translator, and most often it says no language detected.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

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

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

But doesn't add something to what has come before; but takes something away. At its most daring, it can feel like a Bat Turn, a 180-degree spin int the Batmobile. Make that a But Turn.

~ Roy Peter Clark

The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it.

~ Jonathan Culver

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

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

Let me just acknowlege that the function of grammar is to make language as efficent and clear and transparent as possible. But if we’re all constantly correcting each other’s grammar and being really snotty about it, then people stop talking because they start to be petrified that they’re going to make some sort of terrible grammatical error and that’s precisely the opposite of what grammar is supposed to do, which is to facilitate clear communication.

~ John Green

Yes I am aware of the rules. Yes I can totally see how I err the Queen.Yes it is this very fact of slaying her language.That gives my soul its melodies.

~ Malebo Sephodi

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

~ Jonathan Heatt

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

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

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

~ Red Red Rover

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.

~ Molière

Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.

~ D.t. Max

Perfect grammar--persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.

~ Mark Twain

Grammar is like a strive for perfection. It's useless really.

~ S. Khemka

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better.

~ Courage Knight

Grammar is politics by other means.

~ Donna J. Haraway

#Twitter: proudly promoting ghastly grammar and silly misspelling since 2006.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

... Likewise, Oscar Wilde asked an English journalist to look over 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' before publication: Will you also look after my 'wills' and 'shalls' in proof. I am Celtic in my use of these words, not English. Wilde's novel upset virtually every code of late Victorian respectability, but he had to get his modal auxiliaries just right.

~ Andrew Elfenbein

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, police grammar on the Internet.

~ Ruadhán J. Mcelroy