“A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.”

“Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.”

“English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.”

“In the nineteenth century, poetry was a bestselling genre rather than the cultish phenomenon it is now.”

“Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.”

“We’re all Dennis Hopper now.”

“For all but the sliver of poetry fans, over the past forty years popular song lyrics have been the nation’s poetry.”