Grammar Quotes

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
― Dorothy Parker

“My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening.

If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

“One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
― James D. Nicoll

“A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.”
― Baltasar Gracián

“I might not use capital letters. But I would definitely use an apostrophe…and probably a period. I’m a huge fan of punctuation.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.”
― Terry Jones

“His sentences didn't seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action. ”
― Jennifer Crusie, Charlie All Night

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find?”
― Lemony Snicket, The Wide Window

“The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“It's hard to take someone seriously when they leave you a note saying, 'Your ugly.' My ugly what? The idiot didn't even know the difference between your and you're.”
― Cara Lynn Shultz, Spellcaster

“This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank.”
― Christopher Moore, Fool

“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

“Grammar is politics by other means.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“If you can spell "Nietzsche" without Google, you deserve a cookie.”
― Lauren Leto

“This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“I have no idea what that is, but yawn, anyway, just on principle. Eat up. Pancakes is brain food.
Apparently not grammar food.
Wow.You college girls are mean.”
― Rachel Caine, Bite Club

“I love you. You are the object of my affection and the object of my sentence.”
― Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing (Quick & Dirty Tips)

“The word ‘God’ is a part of language and its grammar. Even if the whole world turns atheist tomorrow, the incredible arrangement of these three letters would still survive.”
― Abhaidev, The Gods Are Not Dead

“I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!”
― Roman Payne

“Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana