Quotes About Grammar

Words too can be wrung from us like a cry from that space which doesn't seem to be the body nor a metaphor curving into perspective. Rather the thickness silence gains when pressed. The ghosts of grammar veer toward shape while my hopes still lie embedded in a quiet myopia from which they don't want to arise. The mistake is to look for explanations where we should just watch the slow fuse burning. Nerve of confession. What we let go we let go.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Modern English Usage

The bridge between the words glamour and grammar is magic. According to the OED, glamour evolved through an ancient association between learning and enchantment.

Ben Yagoda's fine book When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It.

parts of speech.

I couldn't possibly have sex with someone with such a slender grasp on grammar!

Enquanto a língua é um rio caudaloso, longo e largo, que nunca se detém em seu curso, a gramatica normativa é apenas um igapó, uma grande poça de água parada, um charco, um brejo, um terreno alagadiço, á margem da língua.

Strunk & White

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

Why hyphenate, why parenthesize, unless absolutely necessary?

Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar-- I say, you say, he and she, it, on the other hand, does not say --paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we've agreed on.

the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar.

Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language. A good design should be like a well made sentence and it should only express one idea at a time.

Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.

the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In

Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find?

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.

When Halt was in a bad mood, he invariably paid careful attention to his grammar.

Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss.

The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.

Imagination?' said Holmes with some annoyance. 'And are the mere facts not sufficient in themselves? Must they be dressed up with French phrases dimly remembered from one's distant schooldays and hurriedly – though all too often inadequately – checked with an elementary grammar before dispatch to the publisher?

Punctuation is to words as cartilage is to bone, permitting articulation and bearing stress.

an interrobang is an unorthodox combination of question mark and exclamation point. How did this happen?!!!???