Quotes about grammar

No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

— Isaac Babel

Spel chekers, hoo neeeds em?

— Alan James Bean

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

— Winston Churchill

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

— Joan Didion

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

— Robert Frost

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

— Ernest Hemingway

Grammar is the grave of letters.

— Elbert Hubbard

Grammar, which can govern even Kings.

— Moliere

The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.

— Edgar Allan Poe

I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.

— Carl Sandburg

Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

— Lewis Thomas

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat.

— Henry David Thoreau

From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. 'After dinner, the men moved into the living room'. I explained to the professor that this was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.

— James Thurber

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

— Mark Twain

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

— Source Unknown

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

— Elwyn Brooks White

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein