Quotes by Mary Norris

Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.

If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.

You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.

Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.

So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.

Was it an insult to be called a “woman writer”? Didn’t it have a taint of, say, the “woman driver”?

The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.