Quotes About Punctuation

Sighs are the punctuation of most of our lives, of relief, of how much worse it could have been, of "Now what?

When grown-ups asked you to sit in a circle, they were usually about to tell you something you didn't want to hear. Ms. Aruba-Tate, Ivy and Bean's second-grade teacher, was forever gathering them in a circle for bad news. Like, the class fish died over the weekend. Or, everyone has to start using real punctuation. Or, the pencil sharpener is off-limits. Circles meant trouble.

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.

Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss.

an interrobang is an unorthodox combination of question mark and exclamation point. How did this happen?!!!???

The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath.

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.

I get enraged at the tyranny of text." "What's that?" "You know. Left to right. Punctuation. Page 1, page 2, page 3.

My father." I don't even know what punctuation mark to put after those two words. Lots of exclamation points!!! One lonely question mark? I need a cartoon balloon with every symbol available in it. Something that stands for stunned/terrified/pissed off/excited/depressed/happy/mad.

And another small point, or two actually; Aldus was the first to use the modern semicolon.

The man credited with inventing the comma, colon, and full stop punctuation marks was a librarian of Alexandria called Aristophanes.

Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.

You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.

Write the book the way it should be written, then give it to somebody to put in the commas and shit.

I dream of a world where one could die for a comma.

Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, "no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, "no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place." We're

Anyone using two or more exclamation points together will not only be rejected but taken out and shot!!!

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

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called separable verbs. The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.

Me to Comma: I will never get use to you wanting to butt your way into my sentences -- even if you're right.

20 or 30 exclamation points can go a long way to making the tone of your email excited and cheerful.