Donald Hall Quotes

I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.

The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.

Grammar is the analysis of language.

Grammar is the grave of letters.

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format.

Make no a complete sentence.

Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.

I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.

They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

The thing that's depressing is teaching graduate students today and discovering that they don't know simple elemental facts of grammar. They really do not know how to scan a line; they've never been taught to scan a line. Many of them don't know the difference between 'lie' and 'lay,' let alone 'its' and 'it's.' And they're in graduate school!

The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.

I know what the structure of the language is.

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.

I'm pretty sure when I need a comma; I'm not so sure about a semicolon.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.