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English Grammar Quotes

My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.

My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.

A. A. Milne
Writing, English Grammar, Letters
Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) ch. 6

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

William Safire
English Grammar, Perfect, Perfection
William Safire (2011). “Watching My Language:: Adventures in the Word Trade”, p.383, Random House

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

Joan Didion
Music, Power, English Grammar
FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 16, 2011

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

Robert Graves
English Grammar, Poet, Break
Lecture at Oxford. Time, December 15, 1961.

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.

Bill Bryson
Latin, Simple, English Grammar

Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar.

Robert Breault
English Grammar, Law, Grammar

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
Powerful, Simple, English Grammar
Roald Dahl (1987). “The Roald Dahl omnibus”, Hippocrene Books

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.

Richard Chenevix Trench
Writing, Editing, English Grammar
Richard Chenevix Trench (1867). “On the Study of Words Lectures Addressed (originally) to the Pupils at the Diocesan Training-school, Winchester by Richard Chenevix Trench”, p.22

I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period.

Robert Burchfield
Believe, English Grammar, Years

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
Latin, Simple, English Grammar
Robert A. Heinlein (1959). “The Door Into Summer”, Roc

Word lessons, in particular the wouldst couldst shouldst have loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of French, Latin, and English grammars to memory.

John Muir
Memories, Latin, English Grammar
John Muir, Terry Gifford (1996). “John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings”, p.29, The Mountaineers Books

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