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Quotes About Parentheses

Even the way Mamet describes silences within his plays is different. There are pauses; there are pauses within parentheses; there are pauses before dialogue; there are pauses in the spaces between the dialogue - there's this extraordinary vocabulary of silence which is all there on the page, mapped out.
~ Tom Sturridge
And there are even more unusual cases in poetry, where the observation that parentheses include content of secondary importance needs to be turned on its head. In a poem, what is within the parentheses is always significant -- often more so than in the surrounding text.
~ David Crystal
I am one of those that always get accidentally guillotined when the Great Day of Liberation comes, because ... I guess ... I am full of parentheses. Revolutions can't abide parentheses.
~ James Tiptree Jr.
If you can't hear me, it's because I'm in parentheses.
~ Steven Wright
Olmo Panero a traversé les Pyrénées pour nous dire que les mots étaient des parenthèses de silence.
~ Yasmina Reza
Other attempts appear as scars, weals, parentheses in conversation, absent days in his diary. But, at the same time, according to Stuart's weird sense of etiquette on such subjects, only one son in a family is allowed to kill himself, else it puts too much strain on the parents, and his brother, Gavvy, like Jacob in the Old Testament, has stolen Stuart's birthright.
~ Alexander Masters
I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.
~ Margaret Atwood
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
~ John Irving
He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James. "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.
~ George Eliot
He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James. "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader. "Why
~ George Eliot
We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
~ Alan Perlis
I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens.
~ Scarlett Thomas
His mustache made two curved lines around the sides of his mouth like parentheses, as if everything he might say would be very quiet, and incidental.
~ Barbara Kingsolver
Não sobrava nada além de uma tola liberdade condicional, a piada de se viver como uma palavra entre parênteses, divorciada da frase principal e da qual, no entanto, é quase sempre sustentação e explicação
~ Julio Cortazar
If you can't hear me, it's because I'm in parentheses.
~ Steven Wright
Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.
~ Carol Shields
Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses.
~ Neal Stephenson
Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence.
~ Neal Stephenson
Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell.
~ Charles Dickens
I put in these parentheses to signify a complicated wink — you understand?
~ Mark Twain
All I can suggest to you is, if he parentheses bug you, don't read them.
~ William Goldman
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.
~ Jodi Picoult
Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas--a whole grammar made of light, for words to hard to speak.
~ Jodi Picoult