Quotes About Punctuation

But still, it looked completely natural, as if we had been kissing at the ends of sentences for ages, while the rest of the world was still hung up on punctuation.

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

Death is the only grammatically correct full stop.

Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment.

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.

They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff.

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

They spoke in semaphore, all punctuation unnecessary. "You?" "Great." They'd trimmed the language to its essentials. Before long it would just be consonants. Then silence.

In our world, Darija said, throwing aside the chapter she was marking up, there will be no semicolons.

Seems indecisive, doesn't it? Either be a period or be a comma, but make up your mind.

Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.

I don't think, in my entire 18 years as a student, I ever used an exclamation point in an academic paper.

Commas are not your friend.

Cutters read the land like a text. They search the manuscript of the ground for irregularities in its narration. They know the plots and the images by heart. They can see where the punctuation goes. They are landscape grammarians, got the Ph.D. in reading dirt.

reader's report by Arlo Bates, a poet favoured by the firm, noted Dickinson's 'crudity of workmanship'. He foresaw no possibility of making a stir but did concede that this was the real thing, a power near to genius. Had she published—had she learnt the conventions of punctuation and rhyme—'she would have stood at the head of American singers'.

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.

The rule is: don't use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.

Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.