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English grammar Quote by Ilya Kaminsky

““I believe that no great lyric poet ever speaks in the so-called “proper” language of his or her time. Emily Dickinson didn’t write in “proper” English grammar but in slant music of fragmentary perception. Half a world and half a century away, Cesar Vallejo placed three dots in the middle of the line, as if language itself were not enough, as if the poet’s voice needed to leap from one image to another, to make—to use Eliot’s phrase—a raid on the inarticulate. Paul Celan wrote to his wife from Germany, where he briefly visited from his voluntary exile in France: “The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.””

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Emily Dickinson English grammar Poetry

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But in the secret history of anger--one man's silence / lives in the bodies of others.

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“One would think of a boy laying syllables with his tongue onto a woman’s skin: those are lines sewn entirely of silence.”

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More English grammar quotes

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“English grammar and composition is difficult even for the English, but worse and worse for a Welsh boy. He speaks, reads, writes, and he thinks in Welsh, at home, in the street, and in Chapel, and when he reads English he will understand it in Welsh, and when he speaks English, he will pronounce the words with pain and using…

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Word lessons, in particular the wouldst couldst shouldst have loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole…

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Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.

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“the rules of English grammar are largely an artificial construct with little or no bearing on the language as it is spoke.”

Ben Aaronovitch

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Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

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Browse all 18 English grammar quotes