20 Interesting Grammar Quotes
1. “Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.” -Joan Didion
2. “My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.” -A.A. Milne
3. “Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.” -Beryl Bainbridge
4. “A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.” -Winston S. Churchill
5. “Perfect grammar — persistent, continuous, sustained — is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.” -Mark Twain
6. “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
7. “The past is always tense, the future perfect.” -Zadie Smith
8. “A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.” -Baltasar Gracian
9. “Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don’t you find?” -Lemony Snicket
10.“I don’t know the rules of grammar. If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.” -David Ogilvy
11. “Vowels were something else. He didn’t like them and they didn’t like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn’t tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.” -Jerry Spinelli
12. “Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears…” -Jack Kerouac
13. “Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.” -C.S. Lewis
14. “Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.” -Vera Nazarian
15. “All nouns are abbreviations. Instead of saying cold, sharp, burning, unbreakable, shining, pointy, we utter ‘dagger’; for the receding sun and oncoming darkness, we say ‘twilight.’” Jorge Luis Borges
16. “After verbs, plain nouns are your strongest tools; they resonate with emotion.” William Zinsser
17. “Punctuation is important, but the rules are changing. Spelling is important today in a way that it wasn’t when Shakespeare was a boy. Grammar isn’t set in stone.” -Gyles Brandreth
18. “At times I’ve felt less like a punctuation theorist than like a punctuation therapist.” -Cecelia Watson
19. “None of the writings, one can exclude from the grammatical errors and mistakes; it means not a verdict, for disqualification since thought and vision of every writing subject prevail, not the grammar.” -Ehsan Sehgal
20. “Grammar too, in its general principles, has a close connexion with the understanding, and the theory of the association of ideas.” -George Campbell
Did I miss any interesting grammar quote?
Care to share yours?
