English Grammar Quotes:

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

- Robert A. Heinlein

source: Robert A. Heinlein (1959). “The Door Into Summer”, Roc

topic: Latin, Simple, English Grammar, I Quit

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.

- Richard Chenevix Trench

source: Richard Chenevix Trench (1867). “On the Study of Words Lectures Addressed (originally) to the Pupils at the Diocesan Training-school, Winchester by Richard Chenevix Trench”, p.22

topic: Writing, Editing, Speech, English Grammar

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

- William Safire

source: William Safire (2011). “Watching My Language:: Adventures in the Word Trade”, p.383, Random House

topic: Perfect, Grammar, English Grammar

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

- Joan Didion

topic: Play, Piano, Ears, English Grammar, Bad Grammar

Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar.

- Robert Breault

topic: Law, Grammar, English Grammar

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

- Robert Graves

source: Lecture at Oxford. Time, December 15, 1961.

topic: Poet, Break, Should, English Grammar

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

- E. B. White

topic: Inspiring, Faith, Writing, English Grammar

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.

- Mark Twain

topic: Funny, Cat, Fighting, Aggravating, English Grammar

My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.

- A. A. Milne

topic: Writing, Letters, Spelling, Winni The Pooh, Winnie The Pooh Book

Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.

- Bill Bryson

topic: Baseball, Football, Latin, Infinitive, English Grammar

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

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

topic: Teacher, Husband, School, Eighth Grade, English Grammar

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.

- Bill Bryson

topic: Latin, Simple, Confusing, Instant Coffee, Infinitive

Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!

- Roald Dahl

topic: Powerful, Simple, Littles, English Grammar

For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve. Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?

- Bill Bryson

topic: Book, Writing, Men, Quirks, English Grammar

I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period.

- Robert Burchfield

topic: Believe, Years, Political, Intervening, Modern English

Word lessons, in particular the wouldst couldst shouldst have loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of French, Latin, and English grammars to memory...

- John Muir

topic: Memories, Latin, Lessons, English Grammar