Quotes About Parentheses

#1. 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

#2. I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.

Margaret Atwood

#3. Life is such an effort, Child. It's a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which you pay a cruel price.

Oriana Fallaci

#4. 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

#5. You know, in the sentence of humanity this place needs to be a parentheses. And when I say parentheses I mean I'm talking like you go around it. Leave it alone. Let it exist. And what I want people to see with this film is not only a respect for this place from the bottom of my heart.

DJ Spooky

#6. Brackets come in various shapes, types and names:
1 round brackets (which we call brackets, and the Americans call parentheses)
2 square brackets [which we call square brackets, and the Americans call brackets]

Lynne Truss

#7. Her hair is longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of words I was not around to hear.

Jodi Picoult

#8. I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.

Beth Kephart

#9. (Parentheses speak
More than we dare say out loud
Why, oh, why is that?)

Megan McCafferty

#10. 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.

#11. I'd even had business cards made up reading, ABIGAIL COOPER, P.I. with teeny-weeny little letters underneath in parentheses spelling out PSYCHIC INTUITIVE. Most people think I'm trying to be clever. The truth is, I'm a chickenshit.

Victoria Laurie

#12. Bowie talks in great, voluble torrents, darting from one topic to the next, parenthesizing and then parenthesizing the parentheses, as if he has too many ideas for one conversation.

Sean Egan

#13. Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses.

Neal Stephenson

#14. I feel I'm living in parentheses

Steven Wilson

#15. Jack seemed kind. He was craggy and athletic, with lines like parentheses around his mouth, as if everything he wanted to say was an afterthought.

Sarah Addison Allen

#16. On the way home, I saw a fist fight between an adverb and a pair of parentheses.
I kept on walking.

Peter James West

#17. There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for - the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.

Margaret Atwood

#18. Sloppy script and felt a pang of guilt. She started to close the notebook but paused in thought. It didn't feel right. It didn't seem ... truthful. With a heavy hand and a heavy heart, she added in parentheses

Chanda Hahn

#19. A dash is a mark of separation stronger than a comma, less formal than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses.

William Strunk Jr.

#20. They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.

Daniel Handler

#21. Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell.

Charles Dickens

#22. I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

D.H. Lawrence

#23. The censure of frequent and long parentheses has led writers into the preposterous expedient of leaving out the marks by which they are indicated. It is no cure to a lame man to take away his crutches.

Richard Whately

#24. We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

Alan Perlis

#25. 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

#26. If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

Pico Iyer

#27. I hereby certify that the bearer of this note, Nikolai Ivanovich, spent the night in question at Satan's ball, having been lured there in a transportational capacity ... Hella, put in parentheses! And write 'hog.' Signed- Behemoth.

Mikhail Bulgakov

#28. But when launches were delayed, everything moved into a strange sort of limbo...a launch that was supposed to have gone up one morning but wouldn't attempt again until the next made us all feel we were living in a day that didn't count, a day between parentheses.

Margaret Lazarus Dean

#29. Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.

Carol Shields

#30. 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

#31. If you can't hear me, it's because I'm in parentheses.

Steven Wright

#32. 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

#33. Ruth smiles, which rearranges the lines on her face. She inverts her parentheses and transforms commas into apostrophes. The pattern is that of a woman who has no regrets.

Julie Buxbaum

#34. I wanted him to know that I saw him, a guy who, even with a tear-streaked face, seemed to have two tiny smiles framing his eyes like parentheses, a guy on the ground pantomiming his death to remind the world he was alive.

Jason Reynolds

#35. Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents.

Vladimir Nabokov

#36. I privately say to you, old friend ... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

J.D. Salinger

#37. By itself, 1 Corinthians 15 just wouldn't mean much. He wants the appearances of 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 to be read as if they had in parentheses after them 'See Luke 24; Matthew 28; John 21.'

Robert M. Price

#38. Antarctica is one of the most remote and beautiful places on earth. I don't think that everyone should go there. I also think that we need to respect it as a kind of a national park for the planet. It should be you know put in parentheses.

DJ Spooky

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

George Eliot

#40. The Christian will find his parentheses for prayer even in the busiest hours of life.

Richard Cecil

#41. You cannot put patience and experience into a parenthesis, and, omitting them, bring hope out of tribulation.

Alexander MacLaren