Quotes and Sayings about Grammar
"What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses."
- David Baker
(Related: Grammar, Tools)
"His eyes so dim, so wasted each limb, that, heedless of grammar, they all cried, that's him!"
- Richard Harris Barham
(Related: Eyes, Grammar)
"You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy."
- Peter Bogdanovich
(Related: Movies, People, Film, Grammar, Pretty, Sense)
"At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction."
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(Related: Reading)
"It's really difficult for me. Language, I am sorry that I haven't. I think I just always expected that you learn a word in place of a word and when I discovered how difficult the grammar was and learning that was very discouraging for me."
- Bo Derek
(Related: Grammar, Language, Learning, Word)
"Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power."
- Joan Didion
(Related: Power, Grammar, Play)
"I was raised in Hollywood and knew, from as early as grammar school, classmates who were in the business."
- Mike Farrell
(Related: Business, Grammar, Hollywood, School)
"I studied at a grammar school and later at the University of Vienna in the Faculty of Medicine."
- Karl von Frisch
(Related: Grammar, Medicine, School, University)
"It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar."
- Fred Frith
(Related: Body, Grammar, Language, Learning, Vocabulary)
"Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning."
- Oliver Goldsmith
(Related: Genius, Grammar, Learning, Liquor, Nonsense)
"When a thought takes one's breath away, a grammar lesson seems an impertinence."
- Thomas W. Higginson
(Related: Thought, Grammar)
"I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello."
- Anthony Holden
(Related: Music, Grammar, Horror, Old, School)
"I used to go with him and I'd sometimes play, take over from him. That was my first taste of the music business, I suppose, but I was also in the youth orchestra at Johnston Grammar."
- Trevor Horn
(Related: Music, Business, First, Grammar, Play, Taste, Youth)
"I went to the local schools, the local state primary school, and then to the local grammar school. A secondary school, which technically was an independent school, it was not part of the state educational system."
- John Hume
(Related: Grammar, School, Schools, State)
"I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric."
- Dorothy Kilgallen
(Related: Style)
"This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America."
- William Labov
(Related: African, America, American, English, Grammar, Vocabulary)
"Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs."
- Jack Lynch
(Related: Arguments, Grammar, Style)
"A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'"
- A. P. Martinich
(Related: Grammar, Philosophy)
"Then when I was in grammar school I played the clarinet, and then, after clarinet I played the flute in college orchestra - besides singing in the college chorus and things like that."
- Bobby McFerrin
(Related: College, Grammar, School, Singing)
"Grammar, which knows how to control even kings."
- Moliere
(Related: Control, Grammar, Kings)
"Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries."
- Gilbert Murray
(Related: Grammar, Language, Unconscious)
"At age 11 in 1960, I moved to an academic state secondary school, Harrow County Grammar School for Boys."
- Paul Nurse
(Related: Age, Boys, Grammar, School, State)
"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, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular."
- David Ogilvy
(Related: People, Day, Grammar, Language, Rules, Trying)
"Grammar schools are public schools without the sodomy."
- Tony Parsons
(Related: Grammar, Public, Schools)
"Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings."
- Octavio Paz
(Related: Criticism, Grammar)
"Statistics is the grammar of science."
- Karl Pearson
(Related: Science, Grammar, Statistics)
"I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it."
- Carl Sandburg
(Related: Life, Mistake, Grammar)
"In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Grammar, Language, Spirit, Study)
"The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: First, Grammar, Language)
"Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar."
- Ferdinand de Saussure
(Related: Grammar, Language)
"Be able to correctly pronounce the words you would like to speak and have excellent spoken grammar."
- Marilyn vos Savant
(Related: Grammar, Words)
"I am the Roman Emperor, and am above grammar."
- Emperor Sigismund
(Related: Grammar)
"Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason."
- Richard Chenevix Trench
(Related: Grammar, Logic, Reason, Speech)
"Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar."
- E. B. White
(Related: Faith, Act, Grammar, Writing)
"Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Related: Thought, Grammar, Harmony, Language, Reality)