Have Done Grammar Quotes & Sayings

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy. — Colum McCann

People who start a sentence with personally (and they're always women) ought to be thrown to the lions. It's a repulsive habit. — Georgette Heyer

My goal was to reach this literary crowd, but I didn't want to alienate my core fan base. I grew up speaking that language, this isn't put on. I can go back and forth; it's almost like being bilingual. But I'm not college educated; I don't know rules of grammar. — Rude Jude

Although I don't use it nearly so much anymore, I've decided, five years down the line, that Mr. Treadstone's verdict on 'kind of' was kind of unjust. Obviously, this phrase can be redundant or reductive, or just plain stupid in some sentences, but not in all sentences. I wouldn't, for example, use a sentence like 'Antarctica is kind of cold', or 'Hitler was kind of evil'. But sometimes, things aren't black and white. And sometimes 'kind of' expresses this better than any other phrase. For example, when I tell you that my mother was kind of peculiar, I can think of no better way of putting this. — Gavin Extence

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge. — Douglas Coupland

Use correct grammar and punctuation. Do not use net speak, like WOT, W-O-T or U. Those messages get a lot lower reply rate. — Christian Rudder

Boys, young men, men of all ages are being captivated by the new visual grammar which pushes men to pout and posture. — Susie Orbach

The police never saw a noun they didn't want to turn into a verb, so it quickly became "to action", as in you action me to undertake a Falcon assessment, I action a Falcon assessment, a Falcon assessment has been actioned and we all action in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.
This, to review a major inqurity is to review the list of "actions" and their consequences, in the hope that you'll spot something that thirty-odd highly trained and experienced detectives didn't. — Ben Aaronovitch

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules. — Mark Twain

All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tyranny begins with the laws of grammar. — Marty Rubin

Madame Bellwings, Memoir Elf Coordinator, was not at all pleased with this request, because elves who write the memoirs of teenage girls have the habit of returning to the magical realm with atrocious grammar. They can't seem to shake the phrases "watever" and "no way," and they insert the word like into so many sentences that the other elves start slapping them ... and for no apparent reason occasionally call out the name Edward Cullen. — Janette Rallison

Traditional grammar — Larry Beason

Grammar schools are public schools without the sodomy. — Tony Parsons

Sauces in cookery are like the first rudiments of grammar - the foundation of all languages. — Alexis Soyer

I think the prospect of bringing back grammar schools has always been wrong and I've never supported it. And I don't think any Conservative government would have done it. — David Cameron

Those who think that metaphysics is just misunderstood grammar will react to my giving metaphysics some place or another in the system of knowledge. — Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they 'speak with the accent of natives' they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds. — Ivan Illich

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died - and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence - they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories. — Robert Galbraith

The best grammarian still can't write a verse. — Dagobert D. Runes

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style. — Louis Aragon

In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs' attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives' attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs' importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT's cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else. — David Foster Wallace

It's good netiquette to judge others by the the intent of their words not content of characters. — David Chiles

What had happened to the old Jack Grammar, the one who would have flubbed it somehow?
Well, I reasoned: I could still flub it. Let the flubbing begin! — Alex Bradley

That last bit of babble had gone home. How was they supposed to know, that was ungrammatical but right. — Stephen King

Hazel grew up - did four years in grammar school, four years in reform school, and didn't learn a thing in either place. Reform schools are supposed to teach viciousness and criminality but Hazel didn't pay enough attention. — John Steinbeck

I do not put much stock in "believing in God." The grammar of "belief" invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. "Belief" implies propositions about which you get to make up your mind before you know the work they are meant to do. — Stanley Hauerwas

I must say my prayers today whether I feel devout or not; but that is only as I must learn my grammar if I am ever to read the poets. — C.S. Lewis

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

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail. — Ben Marcus

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

But the remarkable thing about the beetles was their sensitivity to all the grammar and directives and slogans and even unstated desires of the ant world, which they learned to manipulate. They first memorized the proper antenna-vibration and foreleg-tap which the ants themselves used to request food. The poor workers, busy going here and there and back again all day and never getting a chance to think, automatically assumed that these fearsome strangers had been authorized by the Central Committee since they knew the password, and so they regurgitated a drop or two of fruit juice on cue, much the same as when one is traveling across Europe or Asia on the train and a person in uniform requests one's passport, one's ticket, takes them away, and comes back, or else does not come back, having sold them; a badge and a superior manner can obtain anything in this world. — William T. Vollmann