Grammar Quotes - Page 13

• My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Worry Less, Perfect, Language

  "Anthony Bourdain The ‘Parts Unknown’ Interview". Interview with Kam Williams, newsblaze.com. January 9, 2015.

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• The opening of the first grammar school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.

  James Russell Lowell

  Education, School, Church

  James Russell Lowell (1870). “Among my Books, etc”, p.242

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• We have even done a weekend on Japanese grammar! Not that I know anything about Japanese grammar, but it was Kaz's idea, and it was a bit of an adventure, to say the least.

  Joan Halifax

  Adventure, Weekend, Ideas

  "About Kazuaki Tanahashi: An Interview with Roshi Joan Halifax". Shambhala Interview, www.shambhala.com.

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• [Malcolm Fraser] went straight from Melbourne Grammar to Oxford. And he would have been a very lonely person, and I think he probably met a lot of black students there who were also probably lonely. I think he formed friendships with them, which established his judgement about the question of colour. That’s my theory. I don’t know whether it’s right or not, but that’s what I always respected about Malcolm. He was absolutely, totally impeccable on the question of race and colour.

  Bob Hawke

  Lonely, Thinking, Race

  Source: www.commonwealthoralhistories.org

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• All the arguments there are against Malcolm [Turnbull] - and there are many - the one thing in which he is impeccable and why I would support him in this is that he has an absolutely impeccable record on the question of colour and race. People often wondered why. What I see as a possible explanation is [that] he came from a very wealthy family - a 'squattocracy' - and he had private education at home and then he went to boarding school at Melbourne Grammar School, one of those lead schools in Australia.

  Bob Hawke

  Home, School, Race

  Source: www.commonwealthoralhistories.org

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• If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.

  Ray Bradbury

  Teacher, School, Editors

  Ray Bradbury (1990). “Fahrenheit 451: Curriculum Unit”

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• People… they don’t write anymore – they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.

  David Duchovny

  Kings, Stupid, Writing

  "Fictional character: Hank Moody". Californication (TV Series), www.imdb.com. 2007.

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• After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

  Michelangelo Antonioni

  Two, Three, Cinema

  Source: scrapsfromtheloft.com

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• . . . among all grammars meeting this condition (of adequacy), we select the simplest.

  Noam Chomsky

  Adequacy, Select, Meetings

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• Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements.

  Amit Ray

  Yoga, Writing, Exercise

  "Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style". Book by Amit Ray, May 29, 2012.

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• 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

  School, Important, Trying

  Interview with Shelley Jackson, believermag.com. January 1, 2007.

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• I transmit astral plane harmonies through my brushes into the physical plane. These otherworld colours are reflected in the alphabet of nature, a grammar in which the symbols are plants, animals, birds, fishes, earth and sky. I am merely a channel for the spirit to utilize, and it is needed by a spirit starved society.

  Norval Morrisseau

  Animal, Sky, Bird

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• I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

  Sarah Dunant

  Memories, Talking, Rivers

  Sarah Dunant (2006). “In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel”, p.264, Random House

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• Forget grammar and think about potatoes

  Gertrude Stein

  Thinking, Potatoes, Forget

  Gertrude Stein (2012). “How to Write”, p.109, Courier Corporation

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• It would also have been helpful to have gone to a Catholic grammar school. The only people who know grammar are those people who went to Catholic grammar school. Those nuns beat it into them.

  Fran Lebowitz

  School, People, Catholic

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• In grammar school, I went to eight o'clock mass pretty much like four days a week.

  Patricia Mauceri

  School, Eight, Four

  Source: www.beliefnet.com

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• I'm a very honorable person. I have lifelong friends from birth, from grammar school, from five years old.

  Tony Vlachos

  School, Years, Birth

  Source: www.hitfix.com

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• A schoolchild should be taught grammar - for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.

  E. B. White

  Children, Writing, Way

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.120, Cornell University Press

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• In fact, by universal grammar I mean just that system of principles and structures that are the prerequisites for acquisition of language, and to which every language necessarily conforms.

  Noam Chomsky

  Mean, Facts, Principles

  Source: chomsky.info

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• When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

  Octavio Paz

  Criticism, Decay, Firsts

  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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• Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

  Adrienne Rich

  Girl, Men, Thinking

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.134, W. W. Norton & Company

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• My grammar school graduating class in 1941 had a little party for 13 or 14 year-old kids. [Trumpeter] King Kolax's band played for the party and Gene Ammons was playing tenor saxophone with the band. And that's when I said, "That's it!" Just like that, tunnelvision ever since.

  Johnny Griffin

  Kings, Party, Kids

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• It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.

  Will Durant

  Philosophy, India, Chess

  "The Case for India". Book by Will Durant, 1930.

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• The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Analysis, Hinduism, Abstraction

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.2599, Manonmani Publishers

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• Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

  John Fowles

  Children, Real, Writing

  John Fowles (1985). “A Maggot”, Jonathan Cape

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