Best 22 quotes of Mary Norris on MyQuotes

Back in the twentieth century, we thought that robots would have taken over by this time, and, in a way, they have. But robots as a race have proved disappointing. Instead of getting to boss around underlings made of steel and plastic with circuitry and blinking lights and tank treads, like Rosie the maid on The Jetsons, we humans have outfitted ourselves with robotic external organs. Our iPods dictate what we listen to next, gadgets in our cars tell us which way to go, and smartphones finish our sentences for us. We have become our own robots.

Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.

Everybody is a writer. Everybody uses e-mail and has Facebook pages and tweets.

Many survivors refuse to talk about what they went through but I've never been ashamed to have been in one of those places. The shame is not mine; the church should be ashamed. They say now they're sorry - what they mean is, sorry they were found out.

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

One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience.

On the printed page, it's best to have everything - you know, to still mind your P's and Q's, dot your I's and cross your T's, yes.

Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.

The comma, if it's left out, sometimes can be a problem. There's a slogan on a T-shirt going around that "Let's Eat, Grandma," and "Let's Eat Grandma.

The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around.

The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.

Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?

A good dictionary can only help.

A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.

I can’t help but think that the way we punctuate now is the right way—that we are living in a punctuation renaissance.

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

Muphry’s Law: “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.

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

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

Whom" may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.

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