Grammar Quotes - Page 11

• Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Order, Photographer

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• Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

  Yann Martel

  Love, Blessing, Qualms About

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice and Virgil”, p.23, Canongate Books

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• Grammar, which knows how to lord it over kings, and with high hands makes them obey its laws.

  Moliere

  Kings, Inspiration, Hands

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 426, Les Femmes Savantes (1672), II. 6, 1922.

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• George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Brilliant

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• 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.

  Charles James

  Cutting, Ideas, Design

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• I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.

  Larry Wall

  Use, Strict

  Usenet postings, 1998.

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• My mother was a schoolteacher and very keen that I go to a city school, so although it was fairly impoverished times, I traveled every day to the Auckland Grammar School.

  Edmund Hillary

  Mother, School, Cities

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• The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

  B. F. Skinner

  Men, Years, Doe

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• I like commas. I detest semi-colons — I don’t think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Thinking, Long Ago, Needs

  "EL Doctorow: 'I don't have a style, but the books do'" by Sarah Crown, www.theguardian.com. January 22, 2010.

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• Considering the multitude of mortals that handle the pen in these days, and can mostly spell, and write without glaring violations of grammar, the question naturally arises: How is it, then, that no work proceeds from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence; of worth for more than one day?

  Thomas Carlyle

  Writing, One Day, Authenticity

  Thomas Carlyle (1872). “Works”, p.63

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• No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

  Andy Rooney

  Teacher, Arbitrary, Matter

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• The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

  George Steiner

  Broken, Silence, Society

  George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.432, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• There's no reason why you can't deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake.

  Toby Young

  School, Curriculum, Reason Why

  "Can Toby Young's free school succeed?". Interview with Peter Wilby, www.theguardian.com. April 5, 2011.

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• Maybe this will be the beginning of a trend? Flat taxes, cutting foreign aid, a referendum on Europe, grammar schools. Who knows?

  Nigel Farage

  School, Cutting, Europe

  "Theresa May accused of lifting cat anecdote from Ukip leader" by Patrick Wintour, www.theguardian.com. October 7, 2011.

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• I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on thesimple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.

  Bernadette Devlin

  School, Years, Thumbs

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• The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Passive Voice, Nouns, Adjectives

  Benjamin Lee Whorf, John B. Carroll, Stephen C. Levinson, Penny Lee (2012). “Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf”, p.113, MIT Press

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• There is a parallel between the twos and the tens. Tens are trying to test their abilities again, sizing up and experimenting to discover how to fit in. They don't mean everything they do and say. They are just testing. . . . Take a good deal of your daughter's behavior with a grain of salt. Try to handle the really outrageous as matter-of-factly as you would a mistake in grammar or spelling.

  Stella Chess

  Daughter, Mistake, Mean

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• There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knolwedge, Grammatica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Mother, Children, Knowledge

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• A writer who can't write in a grammerly manner better shut up shop.

  Artemas Ward

  Writing, Shut Up, Shops

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• I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

  John Updike

  Teacher, Husband, School

  "Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction". The Academy of Achievement interview, www.achievement.org. June 12, 2004.

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• Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Art, Writing, Simple

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.389, Penguin

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• Boyhood is distracted for years with precepts of grammar that are infinitely prolix, perplexed and obscure.

  John Amos Comenius

  Years, Boyhood, Obscure

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• Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.

  Noam Chomsky

  Giving, Study, Individual

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• The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Language, Interpretation, Surface

  Noam Chomsky (2014). “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”, p.15, MIT Press

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• I remember when I was young, in the north, they went to the grammar school little children: they came from thence great lubbers: always learning, and little profiting: learning without book everything, understanding within the book little or nothing.

  Roger Ascham

  Education, Children, Book

  Roger Ascham (1815). “The English Works of Roger Ascham: Preceptor to Queen Elizabeth”, p.254

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