Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

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.

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. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans.

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!

All time exists. That is the truth.... If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind?

If only Jupiter would restore me those bygone years.

I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible.

Paul Levinson has outdone himself: The Plot to Save Socrates is a philosophically rich gem full of big ideas and wonderful time-travel tricks.

If I'm a guy who doesn't seem so merry, It's just because I'm so misunderstood. When I was young I ate a dictionary, And that did not do me a bit of good. For I've absorbed so many words and phrases— They drive me dizzy when I want to speak. I start explaining but each person gazes As if I spoke in Latin or in Greek.

Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas.

Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

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.

There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

Punctuation, is? fun!

Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

We're all just memories of our future selves.

Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more--let me see--more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps ... as prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters.

You can't find me 20 children in Chicago, I don't care which section you go in - you can be on Michigan Avenue or here - and they won't be able to tell you that y is a vowel when it's the final syllable in a word, as in Nancy and icy. And no one bothers to teach the rules anymore - "i before e except after c."

I did this movie, Predestination, and it's one of my favorite movies I've ever made, because sci-fi really lets you talk about ideas in a way that's not pretentious.

Three days: Today, Tomorrow and Yesterday, I know, Yet if the past were cancelled within the here and now, And then the future hidden, I could regain that Day, Which I, before I was, had lived in God's own way.

Time travel may be possible, but it is not practical.

The future will soon be a thing of the past.

Time travel is possible. Will explain later

The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.

It was probably 10 at night when I started to read Donnie Darko. I get in bed and read the first page, and I go, "Hmmm. That's interesting." Second page, "Wow." By the fourth page, my heart started to beat, and I knew. It makes me cry, because I knew I had found a classic film. You just know when you get certain material.