Quotes About Punctuation

We also serve who only punctuate.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

In my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the world around them.

Hope. It's like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It's a fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. And it's the only thing in the world keeping me afloat.

In France, we leave a single space before and after most punctuation marks. In England, there are generally no spaces before punctuation, and one inserts a double space between sentences.

I am very aware that playwrights, particularly good ones, have a intention for everything they write. Language and punctuation is used specifically, and most of the time actors can find wonderful clues about character in the rhythm and cadence of the language used.

So, have you seen Flood? she asked. Cop? She added cop with a high pop on the p, like it was a punctuation mark, not a profession

an apostrophe humbled to a comma.

There's an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It's insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented.

Bad grammar makes me [sic].

Her asterisks are daft, postscripts redundant, and prose parenthetical.

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

Our kiss was niticlimactic. It wasn't that the kiss was bad, but it was just a note of punctuation in our long conversation, a parenthetical remark made in order to assure each other of a deeply felt agreement, a mutual offer of companionship, which is so much more rare than sexual passion or even love.

When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of the curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not.

And another thing," he cautioned me, "don't use a lot of commas. People hate sentences with lots of commas. Keep your sentences short. Readers like short sentences.

Question marks were shaped like a hook for a reason...

Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell.

Practice safe text — use commas and never miss a period.

Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-and-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

Punctuation is meant only to clarify. And fruit off with the little smiley faces.

Punctuation is important, but the rules are changing. Spelling is important today in a way that it wasn't when Shakespeare was a boy. Grammar isn't set in stone.

Without the Oxford comma, you can give people the wrong idea. Famously, the London Times newspaper once ran a brief description of a television documentary featuring Peter Ustinov, promising: Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.

If an abbreviation with a full stop comes at the end of a sentence, you don't need to add another full stop: He really loves his asides, anecdotes, incidental stories, etc. Bless.

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?