#mm

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#grammar

Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote. ↗

— China Miéville

#grammar

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. ↗

— John H. McWhorter

#grammar

The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it. ↗

— Jonathan Culver

#grammar #language #grammar

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail. ↗

— Ben Marcus

#language #spelling #grammar

It is always tedious when someone tells you that if you don't stop crying, they will give you something to cry about, because if you are crying then you already have something to cry about, and so there is no reason for them to give you anything additional to cry about, thank you very much. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#witty-comments #witty

Talking to them was like being placed into conversational purgatory, with no hope of being released without significant damage to one's self-esteem. ↗

— Elizabeth Eulberg

#witty-comments #witty

If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it’s only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean. Because the numinous is everywhere, we need to be reminded of it. We live among wonders. Superhuman cyborgs, we plug into cell phones connecting us to one another and to a constantly updated planetary database, an exo-memory that allows us to fit our complete cultural archive into a jacket pocket. We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen — the thermodynamic miracle of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass. We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn’t we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in — and we made Superman, after all. ↗

— Grant Morrison

#intelligence

There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#another #dejan-stojanovic #leaf #literature #literature-quotes

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#fame #immortality #unfinished-works #writing #literary-criticism