A biography for Mary Norrishasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.”
“Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.”
“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”?”