Punctuated Quotes

#1. Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Erica Jong

#2. One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.

Glen Duncan

#3. Dinosaur: I plan to use punctuated equilibrium to turn this zit into a third eye. Catbert: That's not a natural advantage. You'd better stay away from the fitter dinosaurs.

Scott Adams

#4. War is sometimes described as long periods of boredom punctuated by short moments of excitement. History is often similar, if rather safer.

John H. Arnold

#5. In a city where public executions,duels, fights, magical feuds, and strange events regularly punctuated the daily round, the inhabitants had brought the profession of interested bystander to a peak of perfection. They were, to a man, highly skilled gawpers.

Terry Pratchett

#6. My childhood was colorfully anarchic and punctuated by a lot of change.

Sadie Frost

#7. Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.

Christopher Hitchens

#8. War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory.

Alastair Reynolds

#9. The history of science is the back-and-forth movement of trial-and-error advances and retreats, punctuated by moments of brilliance and marred by periods of excess.

Robert A. Burton

#10. Time slid from under me in drifts like ice skids on the highway, punctuated by sudden sharp flashes where my wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary time:

Donna Tartt

#11. He works at the kennel with Nana," Ben piped up. "And I think him and Mom are dating."
At that, a stillness fell over a throng of admirers, punctuated by a few uncomfortable coughs.

Nicholas Sparks

#12. The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.

James L. Brooks

#13. For hours, they wrote back and forth, a conversation punctuated by short periods of waiting, where Lucy held her breath and kept watch over her phone, resenting the constraints of technology, the limits of distance.

Jennifer E. Smith

#14. The end of the world was supposed to be gradual. There was supposed to be warning. A long, slow slide. What we got was punctuated equilibrium: a stately wobbling, then a sudden tipping point. There was plenty of warning, I suppose. We just weren't paying attention.

Elizabeth Bear

#15. When great depths of unrelenting sorrow are punctuated by great peaks of joy and liberation, the result is delicious.

Georges St-Pierre

#16. Expected a bit more skin, Almeida." She punctuated that with a pointed glance at the shorts area. The man had promised Speedos.
"Think Chicago's seen enough of me, don't you?"
Chicago might have, but Kinsey most definitely had not.

Kate Meader

#17. Argument need not be heated; it can be punctuated with courteous smiles - or sympathetic tears.

J. Sidlow Baxter

#18. Full faith is an all-out, no-holds-barred approach to a life punctuated by actions of belief.

Tony Evans

#19. Dark furrow lines grid the snow, punctuated by orange abacus beads of pumpkins - now the crows own the field ...

John Geddes

#20. He punctuated this last thought with such a deep sigh that a house sparrow singing near by stopped and rushed home to be with his family.

Norton Juster

#21. Life is a series of failures punctuated by brief successes

James Altucher

#22. There were so many times that the sorrow and agony of a particular moment was punctuated by something intensely wonderful and beautiful. Laughter was always sweeter through tears, and joy was more potent when born out of suffering.

Laura Sobiech

#23. Life is often compared to a marathon, but I think it is more like being a sprinter; long stretches of hard work punctuated by brief moments in which we are given the opportunity to perform at our best.

Michael Johnson

#24. Lexicon grabbed me with the opening lines, and never let go. An absolutely thrilling story, featuring an array of compelling characters in an eerily credible parallel society, punctuated by bouts of laugh-out-loud humor.

Chris Pavone

#25. Such avian silence is punctuated only by the occasional plunk of a trout sinking an ovipositioning daddy longlegs, and the hysterical cackle of a Mallard that finally gets last night's joke.

Bruce Beckham

#26. Headlines don't have to
be complete sentences, nor do they have to be punctuated unless they are.

Thomas Bivins

#27. But boys will be boys, our favorite phrase that excuses so many things, while the only thing we have for the opposite gender is women, said with disdain and punctuated with an eye roll.

Mindy McGinnis

#28. If a military life was long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror - as one of her instructors had said - then civilian life seemed to be long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of dismal reflection.

Elizabeth Moon

#29. Lots and lots of jack shit punctuated by intense moments of crazy.

Lynn Red

#30. Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety?

Daniel Goleman

#31. Flying involves endless hours of sheer boredom, punctuated by moments of stark terror.

Alan E. Diehl

#32. Notoriously outspoken, his sentences always punctuated with profanities, General George S. Patton was the epitome of what a leader should be like - or so he thought. Patton believed a leader should look and act tough, so he cultivated his image and his personality to match his philosophy.

Simon Sinek

#33. The overall result was drift punctuated by protest.

Charles Emmerson

#34. He exhaled in disgust. "High school is boredom punctuated by humiliation.

Katie Kennedy

#35. Life is a long boring drive on an empty road punctuated by special moments that make the journey worth taking.

Chloe Thurlow

#36. My life has been like all the lives, long and hard and full of sadness and confusion and horror, a frightening, difficult dream punctuated by brief moments of joy. And as is the case with all people's lives, the moments of joy are never often enough and never long enough.

James Frey

#37. Uh, yeah. Hello? Are you the contest winner?"
His Irish brogue is thick, punctuated by irritation. I pull my proverbial shit together and nod. "Yeah."
"About bloody time. Did you stop to sign autographs?

Tessa Bailey

#38. Music is life. Music defines peoples' experience on this planet. Name one time in your life that wasn't punctuated by the music you listened to at the time. When people are down, they listen to music that commiserates that emotion. When people are amped up, they listen to more upbeat, loud songs.

Mark Hoppus

#39. Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.

Augusten Burroughs

#40. Because my life is empty window of nothingness punctuated by meaningless details of totally mundane non-events.

M. Beth Bloom

#41. When I finally get out of bed, the only thing I want to do is go straight to Amy and demand her forgiveness. Maybe we can at least go back to what we had before our fight, even if all we had was an awkward friendship punctuated by significant silences.

Beth Revis

#42. Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane "experiences" which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.

Tom Hodgkinson

#43. Fragments of the future spun past like whirling puzzle pieces with an endless array of combinations. Yet, even with millions of possible outcomes, the same conclusion punctuated every scenario: blissful happiness.
Love.

Kendall Grey

#44. All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with "of course" and "naturally.

Elizabeth Hardwick

#45. There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows.

Alice Hoffman

#46. An interesting life," Yingling told me, "is one filled with controversial successes punctuated by occasional and spectacular failures.

Craig M. Mullaney

#47. Hell hath no correctly punctuated fury like a book nerd scorned.

Alexandra Petri

#48. Life is endless, not punctuated by nights, days, months and years - for all are one, in the eternal stream ...

Sathya Sai Baba

#49. An inventor's path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.

James Dyson

#50. If that made him heavy company sometimes, so be it. Who decreed that life was to be one long rowdy masquerade (punctuated with those little pets of melancholy indulged by a crowd who made a religion of their feelings)?

Howard Jacobson

#51. ( ... ) I'm not much of anything, ( ... ) besides bored and boring, punctuated by fits of scant self-amusement. And you are ... ?

Chip Kidd

#52. Obama's stern demeanor punctuated by intermittent flashes of his wide, relaxing smile is his greatest weapon in defusing pent-up angst.

Tina Brown

#53. The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.

Aldous Huxley

#54. Never before had she seen such creatures, though they looked much live very large, very shaggy white goats. Thin black horns punctuated the top of their long faces.
You look like a collection of grandfathers, she thought, amused.

Tamora Pierce

#55. On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.

John Updike

#56. Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory.

Ali Shaw

#57. Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

George F. Will

#58. So black was the way ahead that my progress consisted of long periods of inert despondency punctuated by spasmodic lurches forward towards any small chink of light that I thought I saw ... As the years went by, it did not get lighter but I became accustomed to the dark

Quentin Crisp

#59. In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

Gary Hamel

#60. It would seem you are in need of assistance, sidhe-seer." A musical baritone drifted through the window, otherworldly, sensuous, and punctuated by a forbidding growl of thunder.

Karen Marie Moning