Quotes About Commas

Her diction was formal, her sentence structure entirely grammatical—indeed, you could almost hear the commas, semicolons and full stops.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there's gonna come a time that you're gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

Nexus I wrote stubbornly into the evening. At the window, a giant praying mantis rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass, begging vacantly with pale eyes; and the commas leapt at me like worms or miniature scythes blackened with age. the praying mantis screeched louder, his ragged jaws opening into formlessness. I walked outside; the grass hissed at my heels. Up ahead in the lapping darkness he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green, a brontosaurus, a poet.

A good procrastination should feel like you're inserting lots and lots of commas into the sentence of your life.

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.

To those of us accustomed to newspaper headlines, 'PIZZAS' in inverted commas suggests these might be pizzas, but nobody's promising anything, and if they turn out to be cardboard with a bit of cheese on top, you can't say you weren't warned.

Isn't it odd, the attractiveness of type and paper and ink, bodying thoughts and descriptions? Isn't it odd how much the sight can teach us about writing? Commas really look like commas in print.

Some of them had bits of cloth still on them, but most were nothing but whorls and spars of bone. They were a mess of bony apostrophes, commas, and exclamation marks brushed off some giant's notebook into a tangled, ungrammatical heap.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

The difference between my quotations and those of the next man is that I leave out the inverted commas.

Talleyrand, talking of a man who dealt in nothing but quotations, said, "That man has a mind of inverted commas."

The way you use the commas should give your sentence its correct meaning — viz: The men, who were handsome, found partners. There, the relative clause tells us that all the men were handsome and all found partners. The men who were handsome found partners. With this restrictive relative clause, without commas, we are discovering something quite different: here, only the men who were handsome found partners.

You know you're a language nerd when you have a strong opinion about serial commas.

Hemingway had always considered ignorance and intolerance to be like commas, because you often found them in pairs, and almost never did you find one, ignorance, without its evil twin, intolerance.

We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

I work through life with commas. I don't even know, do you have parentheticals?

Almost all the proofreading editors I've encountered seem to have gone to a college where there's a class listed in the catalog as "How To Put Commas In The Wrong Place And The Writer In A Coma.

The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.

Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas--a whole grammar made of light, for words to hard to speak.

You mean that's your idea of desire, with all those commas?