Quotes About Grammar

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

He thought only of one thing--the geometries before him. Here was God speaking in His simple absolute language, according to the same grammar that He had used to start the planets on their smooth and silken dance.

Prepositions are to language as aim is to a gun.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

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

Every word is either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly-coined, or lengthened, or contracted, or altered.

It's no picnic, your Russian grammar; you have to mind your p's and q's.

At times I can barely contain my anger at students. How can you be an English major and not know that you don't put a period after a question mark? Why do even graduate students not know the difference between a novel and a memoir, and why do they keep referring to full-length books as "pieces"?

It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs

Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—'This account of you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.

I before E except after C. Weird?By rebelling against the rules the word itself denotes its very meaning: of strange or extraordinary character, odd, fantastic.I think all writers are weird.

For example, from nouns to verbs to aspects of grammar, we each store language in different areas, recruiting different regions for different components.

he felt the logic of grammar, and he thought he perceived how it spread out from itself, permeating the language and supporting human thought.

Let me hasten to point out that Indonesian is the easiest language in the world-no hedging, no "almost," no "among the easiest." In my experience, Indonesian is the easiest. The grammar is minimal, regular, and simple.

It is because the verb BE has a plain form which does not share its shape with any of the present tense forms that we need to distinguish the plain form as a distinct inflectional form. And if we do so for BE we should do so for all verbs.

Aspect is a grammatical notion, which refers to the way the associated semantic notion of aspectuality is implemented linguistically.

'Being Cyrus' is very young in language or grammar. I am not saying that these things can't be achieved in Hindi. All I am saying is that it would not be the same.

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

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.

Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and at the same time full of imagination and music.

I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.