Grammar Quotes

• Grammar 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 Laird

  Language, Inherent

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• people who understand grammar always have a keen sense of the ridiculous.

  Mary Jane Holmes

  People, Ridiculous, Language

  Mary Jane Holmes (1871). “The English Orphans; Or, A Home in the New World”, p.81

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• 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

  Dark, Pockets, Language

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• Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

  Joan Didion

  Music, Power, English Grammar

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 16, 2011

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• 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

  Reflection, Made, Impression

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• We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Needs, Speech, Revelations

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• Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.

  William Cobbett

  Men, Giving, Our Words

  William Cobbett (1847). “A grammar of the English language, etc”, p.15

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• Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

  William Safire

  English Grammar, Perfect, Perfection

  William Safire (2011). “Watching My Language:: Adventures in the Word Trade”, p.383, Random House

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• There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

  Anthony Burgess

  Vocabulary, Earth, Flesh

  Anthony Burgess (1964). “Language made plain”

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• It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Writing, Speech, Common

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Reality, Language, Harmony

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1974). “Philosophical Grammar: Part I, The Proposition, and Its Sense, Part II, On Logic and Mathematics”, p.162, Univ of California Press

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• Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

  David Crystal

  Reading, Yield, Giving

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• Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

  Octavio Paz

  Criticism, Social, Critics

  Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.263, Grove Press

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• Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

  Robert Graves

  English Grammar, Poet, Break

  Lecture at Oxford. Time, December 15, 1961.

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• One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
  An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
  The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
  The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

  Kenneth Koch

  Dark, Next Day, One Day

  Kenneth Koch (2012). “On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988”, p.75, Knopf

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• A pronoun, too, will aptly reflect the number of its antecedent: "they" does not refer to one person, no matter how many personalities she or he has, or how eager you are to skirt the gender frays.

  Karen Elizabeth Gordon

  Numbers, Personality, Doe

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• Everything bows to success, even grammar.

  Victor Hugo

  Fortune Cookie, Bows

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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• Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.

  H. L. Mencken

  Art, Men, Agony

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “American Language Supplement 2”, p.563, Knopf

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• After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  Humor, Lessons, Impertinence

  Emily Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1902). “Poems”

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• You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

  Robert Frost

  Country, Littles, Ifs

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• The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Sarcasm, Misunderstood, Want

  Edgar Allan Poe (2014). “Complete Collection of Edgar Allan Poe - 170+ eBooks (Complete Tales, Poems, Novels, Essays, Miscellaneous, Play)”, p.1206, Ageless Reads

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• Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

  Mark Twain

  Shame, Damn

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.161, Courier Corporation

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• No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

  Isaac Babel

  Life, Heart, Iron

  1932 Guy de Maupassant.

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• When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.

  Raymond Chandler

  Splits, Damn, Infinitive

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• 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

  Made, Periods, Manifestation

  Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley (2004). “Aleph and other stories”, Penguin Classics

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