Maggie W

“By nature the horse is good. If he learns bad manners by associating with bad men, we ought to lay the blame where it belongs.”
― John Williams Streeter, The Fat of the Land: The Story of an American Farm

“Think about any foreign language you’ve learned (or attempted to). What’s the first thing you learn? Usually how to say “Hello, my name is [Kory]. How are you?” You don’t learn the word for “name,” and the learn the conjugation of “be” (and good thing, too, because it is stubbornly irregular in most languages). You don't learn the interrogative “how” and the various declensions of the second-person pronoun. All that comes later when you have a little something to hand that information on. You learn two complete, if rudimentary, sentences, and that gives you the confidence to keep moving forward—until you reach the subjunctive, anyway.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“Just as ballroom dancing and pair skating command partners to work together seamlessly, in the sport of dressage, the rider performers an intricate pas de deux with his partner—a twelve-hundred-pound four-footed beast.”
― Elizabeth Letts, The Perfect Horse: the Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don't like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that's why it flourishes.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries