Grammar Quotes - Page 12

• Among all the liberal arts, the first is logic, and specifically that part of logic which gives initial instruction about words. ... [T]he word "logic" has a broad meaning, and is not restricted exclusively to the science of argumentative reasoning. [It includes] Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly-the starting point of all liberal studies."

  John of Salisbury

  Art, Writing, Science

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• 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

  Education, Reading, Writing

  Frank Smith (2007). “Reading: FAQ”

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• What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?

  Charles Frazier

  Life, Opportunity, Vocabulary

  Charles Frazier (2006). “Thirteen Moons: A Novel”, p.236, Random House

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• She was, in fact, quite a pleasant looking girl, even if her bosom had clearly been intended for a girl two feet taller; but she was not Her. The Egregious Professor of Grammar and Usage would have corrected this to "she was not she," which would have caused the Professor of Logic to spit out his drink.

  Terry Pratchett

  Girl, Two, Feet

  Terry Pratchett (2009). “Unseen Academicals: (Discworld Novel 37)”, p.36, Random House

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• Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.

  Frederick Buechner

  Justice, Mercy

  FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Jan 23, 2017

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• Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Order, Photographer

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• Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

  Yann Martel

  Love, Blessing, Qualms About

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice and Virgil”, p.23, Canongate Books

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• Grammar, which knows how to lord it over kings, and with high hands makes them obey its laws.

  Moliere

  Kings, Inspiration, Hands

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 426, Les Femmes Savantes (1672), II. 6, 1922.

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• It's a weird partnership. For me and Patrick, if you've met him, we're not very much alike. But we bring such different tools to the table. He doesn't think like me. I don't think like him. He thinks like an editor. He thinks like a director. He thinks completely outside of the box when it comes to writing and so because of that he leads me down roads that I would've never gone down. And he sucks at grammar. So together we're perfect.

  Todd Farmer

  Writing, Thinking, Editors

  Source: collider.com

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• My fascination with images open 24 hrs. is based on the complex interlocking if disparate facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliché. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object freightways by this I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built in.

  Robert Rauschenberg

  Mean, Fate, Hands

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• I can assure you that there is no question of us throwing away the tradition of the Grammar Schools.

  Hugh Gaitskell

  Education, School, Tradition

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• 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

  Writing, Men, Names

  "Rocking the Vote, in the 1820s and Now" by Jon Meacham, www.nytimes.com. October 21, 2010.

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• 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

  Light, Sound, Tumbling

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• We hurt most who we love the most. Bad grammar, painful truth.

  Andy Stanley

  Hurt, Painful, Painful Truth

  Andy Stanley (2011). “Enemies of the Heart: Breaking Free from the Four Emotions That Control You”, p.24, Multnomah

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• Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

  Margaret Atwood

  Past, Technology, Way

  Source: www.slate.com

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• One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Thinking, Issues, Vocabulary

  Source: americanlibrariesmagazine.org

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• The grammar of a language is simply the way it combines smaller elements (such as words) into larger elements (such as sentences).

  Larry Trask

  Elements, Way, Language

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• Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

  Mary McCarthy

  Alarms, Doe, Levels

  Mary McCarthy (1985). “Occasional prose”, Harcourt

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• 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

  Attention, Language, Made

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• photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Ethics, Notion

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.5, Macmillan

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• 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

  Book, Want, Made

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• I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.

  Joan Didion

  Joan Didion (2007). “The Year of Magical Thinking”, p.140, Vintage

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• This is the universal property of the human mind. Abstract rules form the core of everything from computer programs to grammars. Our results show that babies' minds are built to look for such rules - even without being told.

  Gary Marcus

  Baby, Mind, Looks

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• Next, to make them expert in the usefullest points of grammar; and withal to season them and win them early to the love of virtue and true labour, ere any flattering seducement or vain principle seize them wandering, some easy and delightful book of education would be read to them; whereof the Greeks have store, as Cebes, Plutarch, and other Socratic discourses.

  John Milton

  Children, Book, Winning

  John Milton, James Augustus St. John, Charles Richard Sumner (1872). “The Prose Works of John Milton ...: With a Preface, Preliminary Remarks, and Notes”, p.468

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• Time in China has no immediacy as in America. Here I find the swift passage of our few earthly years accepted as naturally as the fall of flower and leaf. ... I hear and speak a language in which grammar has no tense. Both scholars and illiterates, in ordinary daily speech, tell an event of centuries ago as casually as an incident of the hour. Only as my knowledge has accumulated have I been able to know whether something related happened just then or in some past dynasty.

  Nora Waln

  Time, Flower, Fall

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