Quotes About Punctuation

Discerning placement of a comma does not atone for a spiritual coma.

Justin Taylor, editor of Crossway, cites the example of one writer who wanted to thank "my parents, Jesus and Ayn Rand." See what happens when you leave out the serial comma? But Andy Le Peau, at InterVarsity, points to a different kind of example. Suppose someone were to dedicate his book to "my mother, Ayn Rand, and God"? Now the serial comma creates the idea that Ayn Rand is in apposition to mother, which it presumably wasn't.

I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.

Punctuation was, it is sad to say, invented a very long time ago. Even more frustrating, it has remained with us ever since.

Life is the hesitation between an exclamation mark and a question mark. After doubt there is a full stop.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

this is what temporial stuttering FEELS LIKE like a stut stut STUTTERY RUSHING FORWARD in TIME WITHOUT a MOMENT OR an INSTANT TO DISTINGUISH ONE INSTANCE from THE next GROWING EVER LOUDER AND LOUDER WITHOUT PUNCTUATION until SUDDENLY WITHOUT WARNING IT stops.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

It's not an exclamation point. There are no interjections in mathematics.

The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.

When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.

Bad grammar makes me [sic].

Shatner commas: Oddly placed commas that don't seem to serve any actual purpose in punctuation, but make it look like you should take odd pauses, as William Shatner does when delivering lines.

Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation.

True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

And if you want to know why great editors scare the pants off of writers everywhere, read 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss. The punctuation police are everywhere!

To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation.

I don't think music affects what words I choose to type in what order, within what punctuation, at this point, because I'm rereading and editing each sentence, at this point, in my published books, probably 100-150 times each, on average, and listening to probably 20-60 different songs in that time.