Quotes from Lynne Truss

In fact, it seemed to me that every single item on the news – concerning economic doom and political hypocrisy and social breakdown – was not "news" at all. What I could hear was just a series of utterly transparent ploys to frighten and alarm the listeners – and frighten them, moreover, about the wrong things. The

If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don't bother to go any further.

No valentines from the cats again.

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world.

While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else - yet we see it all the time .

is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.

That's why they came up with the emoticon, too—the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.

Il modo in cui ci comportiamo con gli altri, anche nelle cose più piccole, è una misura del nostro valore come esseri umani.

Blood was now spurting in all directions, and the almighty purr was deafening.

Birds' heads in profile, mate? You having a laugh?").

She was one of those invalids who has to lie down a lot, and sometimes can't lift a bread knife, but can shift a mahogany wardrobe if the fancy is upon her to see it in a different place.

No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to get a life by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.

Oh yes, sir. There's no doubt about it, sir. The Punctuation Murderer has struck again.

by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll.

I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course.

Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons; shrivelling question marks on the garden path under a powerful magnifying glass; you name it.

pretentious and over-active" semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought.

Come inside," it says, "for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's.

I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation – but for many it may be too late.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it usually aspiring gangsta rappers who set such store by designer labels?

One moment you can say the words 'I am'. And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.

Wait for it,' the single dash seems to whisper, with a twinkle if you're lucky.

When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to "get a life" by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves. Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions.

Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.