#Grammar Quotes

“Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”

“Preposition: An enormously versatile part of grammar, as in 'What made you pick this book I didn't want to be read to out of up for?'”

“One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided wherever possible.”

“Syntax must be bad, having sin and tax in it.”

“Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to. . . . But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.”

“I hate commas in the wrong places.”

“I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all - they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me - and this adverb plague is one of them.”

“You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does -- but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use.”

“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.”

“George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.”

“Perfect grammar - persistent, continuous, sustained - is the fourth dimension, so to speak; many have sought it, but none has found it.”

“Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.”

“Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.”

“In German, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”

“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.”

“I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.”

“Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.”

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

“Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America.”

“Grammar is the grave of letters.”

“Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.”

“What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America, or Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.”