85 Grammar Quotes

Whether you're a seasoned linguist, an aspiring writer, or simply someone who appreciates the intricacies of language, grammar is an essential component of effective communication. From the structure of sentences to the meticulous use of punctuation, grammar shapes the clarity and impact of our words. In this blog post, we invite you to explore a curated collection of the top 85 grammar quotes. These quotes offer wisdom, humor, and insight from renowned authors, linguists, and thinkers, reminding us of the importance and beauty of grammatical precision. Join us on this journey through language as we celebrate the art and science of grammar through some of its most memorable expressions.

1. “The past is always tense, the future perfect.” - zadie smith

2. “People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.” - B. R. Myers

3. “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.” - Winston S. Churchill

4. “What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?” - Lynne Truss

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

6. “What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.” - Terry Jones

7. “thnkz 4 hlpng e wth e spllng d gwammer mestr josef” - ward schiller

8. “My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.” - A.A. Milne

9. “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.” - David Ogilvy

10. “When your last breath arrives, Grammar can do nothing.” - Adi Shankara

11. “A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.” - Edgar Allan Poe

12. “It never ceases to amaze me how prosaic, pedestrian, unimaginative people can persistently pontificate about classical grammatical structure as though it's fucking rocket science. These must be the same people who hate Picasso, because he couldn't keep the paint inside the lines and the colors never matched the numbers.” - Abbe Diaz

13. “Take what the British call the "greengrocer's apostrophe," named for aberrant signs advertising cauliflower's or carrot's in local fruit and vegetable shops.” - Naomi S. Baron

14. “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

15. “Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.” - Gilles Deleuze

16. “His sentences didn't seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action. ” - Jennifer Crusie

17. “The Grocery Checkout Proviso: The more things you care about, the more vulnerable you are. If you are part of that epicurean minority in this country that is still offended by violations of the English language, you will be slapped in the face every time you stand in line at the market. FIFTEEN ITEMS OR LESS. Caring passionately about grammar—caring passionately about anything most of humanity doesn’t care about—is like poking a giant hole in your life and letting the wind blow everything around.” - Rachel Kadish

18. “If you can spell "Nietzsche" without Google, you deserve a cookie.” - Lauren Leto

19. “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” - Dorothy Parker

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

21. “We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time.” - Stephen W. Hawking

22. “In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty.” - Rabindranath Tagore

23. “Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.” - Richard Mitchell

24. “Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.” - Jerry Spinelli

25. “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

26. “This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank.” - Christopher Moore

27. “The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.” - Michel de Montaigne

28. “I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never "the hoi polloi," because hoi meant "the," and two "the's" were redundant -- indeed something only hoi polloi would say.” - Anne Fadiman

29. “Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn't bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail.” - Kitty Burns Florey

30. “Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.” - Vera Nazarian

31. “A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.” - Baltasar Gracian

32. “The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.” - Lynne Truss

33. “[M]y favorite teacher was explaining that you don't say but however. These are pleonasms: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. There are times in life that are very but however.” - Stefano Benni

34. “Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...” - Jack Kerouac

35. “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

36. “I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

37. “This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.” - Winston S. Churchill

38. “One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.” - Douglas Adams

39. “It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters.” - Lemony Snicket

40. “Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality.” - C.J. Cherryh

41. “And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.” - Douglas Adams

42. “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.” - Gertrude Stein

43. “I have no idea what that is, but yawn, anyway, just on principle. Eat up. Pancakes is brain food.Apparently not grammar food.Wow.You college girls are mean.” - Rachel Caine

44. “A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.” - Winston S. Churchill

45. “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

46. “Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of "1" for the second "h" in the word "hither." Contrary to Cynthia, he cared nothing for the thrill of obscure predictions; all he sought was the freak itself, the chance that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like a flower; and Cynthia, a much more perverse amateur of misshapen or illicitly connected words, puns, logogriphs, and so on, had helped the poor crank to pursue a quest that in the light of the example she cited struck me as statistically insane. ("The Vane Sisters")” - Vladimir Nabokov

47. “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

48. “Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.” - Jasper Fforde

49. “I love you. You are the object of my affection and the object of my sentence.” - Mignon Fogarty

50. “Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.” - C.S. Lewis

51. “Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years. As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms:* Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. * Don't use no double negatives.* Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't.* Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.* Do not put statements in the negative form.* Verbs has to agree with their subjects.* No sentence fragments.* Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.* Avoid commas, that are not necessary.* If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.* A writer must not shift your point of view.* Eschew dialect, irregardless.* And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.* Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!* Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.* Writers should always hyphenate between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyph-ens.* Write all adverbial forms correct.* Don't use contractions in formal writing.* Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.* It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.* If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.* Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.* Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors.* Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.* Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.* Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.* If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.* Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.* Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.* Always pick on the correct idiom.* "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'"* The adverb always follows the verb.* Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives."(New York Times, November 4, 1979; later also published in book form)” - William Safire

52. “Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar.” - Richard Mitchell

53. “If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.” - Lynne Truss

54. “The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.” - Marina Warner

55. “We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.” - Peter Sloterdijk

56. “That Grace looked annoyed at me."I didn't say you would go to jail, Junie B.," she said. "I just wish you would say the word correctly, that's all.” - Barbara Park

57. “The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.” - Parker J. Palmer

58. “I don't think anyone would think that an ellipsis represents doubt or anything. I think it's more, you know, hinting at the future. What lies ahead.” - Sarah Dessen

59. “She whispers in my ear: ‘"Tell me that you wan' fuck me hard, make me sweat." In the excitement, she misses out a word. "I want to fuck you so hard that your body drips with sweat," I say, grammatically.” - Joe Dunthorne

60. “Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.” - Gustave Flaubert

61. “Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find?” - Lemony Snicket

62. “It's hard to take someone seriously when they leave you a note saying, 'Your ugly.' My ugly what? The idiot didn't even know the difference between your and you're.” - Cara Lynn Shultz

63. “Stupid English.""English isn't stupid," I say."Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me.""Why not?""He says lunch isn't a subject."I glance at him. "It isn't.""Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?” - Jodi Picoult

64. “I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!” - Roman Payne

65. “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.” - Joan Didion

66. “#Twitter: proudly promoting ghastly grammar and silly misspelling since 2006.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

67. “In this chthonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right.” - Henry Miller

68. “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” - James D. Nicoll

69. “There's a fine line between funny and annoying – and it's exactly the width of a quotation mark.” - Martha Brockenbrough

70. “...punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.” - Lynne Truss

71. “Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation.” - Lynne Truss

72. “The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it.” - Jonathan Culver

73. “Grammar is politics by other means.” - Donna J. Haraway

74. “Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.” - Laura Kreitzer

75. “Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.” - Andres Neuman

76. “Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.” - D.T. Max

77. “No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.” - Lynne Truss

78. “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

79. “Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.” - Red Red Rover

80. “... Likewise, Oscar Wilde asked an English journalist to look over 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' before publication: "Will you also look after my 'wills' and 'shalls' in proof. I am Celtic in my use of these words, not English." Wilde's novel upset virtually every code of late Victorian respectability, but he had to get his modal auxiliaries just right.” - Andrew Elfenbein

81. “... [In 'Pride and Prejudice'] Mr Collins's repulsiveness in his letter [about Lydia's elopement] does not exist only at the level of the sentence: it permeates all aspects of his rhetoric. Austen's point is that the well-formed sentence belongs to a self-enclosed mind, incapable of sympathetic connections with others and eager to inflict as much pain as is compatible with a thin veneer of politeness. Whereas Blair judged the Addisonian sentence as a completely autonomous unit, Austen judges the sentence as the product of a pre-existing moral agent. What counts is the sentence's ability to reveal that agent, not to enshrine a free-standing morsel of truth.Mr Darcy's letter to Elizabeth, in contrast, features a quite different practice of the sentence, including an odd form of punctation ... The dashes in Mr Darcy's letter transform the typographical sentence by physically making each sentence continuous with the next one. ... The dashes insist that each sentence is not self-sufficient but belongs to a larger macrostructure. Most of Mr Darcy's justification consists not of organised arguments like those of Mr Collins but of narrative. ... The letter's totality exists not in the typographical sentence but in the described event.” - Andrew Elfenbein

82. “همزات الوصل هي المزيدة في ماضي الفعل الخماسي والفعل السداسي وأمرهما ومصدرهما وأمر الثلاثي: انطلَق وانطلِق انطلاقاً، استغفَر واستغفِر استغفاراً، اعْلمْ واكْتب واغفِر.” - سعيد الأفغاني

83. “لا تطلق واو الجماعة ولا الضمير "هم" إلا على الذكور العقلاء. أما جماعة غير العقلاء فيعود عليها الضمير المؤنث مفرداً أو مجموعاً. البضائع شحنتها أو شحنتهن.” - سعيد الأفغاني

84. “إذا أردت تعريف عدد فإن كان مضافاً عرفت المضاف إليه مثل عندي خمسة الكتب المقررة وتسع الوثائق المطلوبة؛ وإن كان مركباً عرفت الجزء الأول: اشتريت الخمسة عشر كتاباً والسبع عشر صحيفة.وإن كان معطوفاً ومعطوفاً عليه عرفت الجزأين معاً مثل: أحضر الثلاثة والخمسين ديناراً.” - سعيد الأفغاني

85. “Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar--I say, you say, he and she, it, on the other hand, does not say--paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we've agreed on.” - Margaret Atwood