Mary Norris Quotes

Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?

The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.

One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience.

Something there is in cyberspace that doesn't love an apostrophe.

Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.

The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around.

Nobody knows everything-one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn-and everybody makes mistakes.

Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.

Everybody is a writer. Everybody uses e-mail and has Facebook pages and tweets.

The comma, if it's left out, sometimes can be a problem. There's a slogan on a T-shirt going around that "Let's Eat, Grandma," and "Let's Eat Grandma."

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.

On the printed page, it's best to have everything - you know, to still mind your P's and Q's, dot your I's and cross your T's, yes.

Many survivors refuse to talk about what they went through but I've never been ashamed to have been in one of those places. The shame is not mine; the church should be ashamed. They say now they're sorry - what they mean is, sorry they were found out.

Back in the twentieth century, we thought that robots would have taken over by this time, and, in a way, they have. But robots as a race have proved disappointing. Instead of getting to boss around underlings made of steel and plastic with circuitry and blinking lights and tank treads, like Rosie the maid on The Jetsons, we humans have outfitted ourselves with robotic external organs. Our iPods dictate what we listen to next, gadgets in our cars tell us which way to go, and smartphones finish our sentences for us. We have become our own robots.