Linguists are no different from any other people who spend more than nineteen hours a day pondering the complexities of grammar and its relationship to practically everything else in order to prove that language is so inordinately complicated that it is impossible in principle for people to talk. – Ronald W. Langacker (b.1942), Language and Its Structure, 1973

[B]ut why care for grammar as long as we are good? – Artemus Ward (1834–1867), Pyrotechny, “V.—What This Young Man Said”

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

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. – Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” 1976