Top 100 Quotes About Punctuation
#1. Sometimes you know that you are destined to die, but somehow you are given a parenthesis after the punctuation mark: more years, more time that wasn't meant for you but still was meant for you, a bridge stretching out into the stars, a confidence built of invisible threads, a miracle.
Lene Fogelberg
#2. It's way too long and I gave up on it. Abandoning forever an innocent child to a hostile and unforgiving land. Sometimes I still hear him crying late at night. He sounds exactly like a malfunctioning air conditioner.
Yahtzee Croshaw
#3. If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.
Mary Norris
#4. This sucks on so many levels." Dialogue from "Jason X" Rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself. "Jason X" sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought.
Roger Ebert
#5. this is what temporial stuttering FEELS LIKE like a stut stut STUTTERY RUSHING FORWARD in TIME WITHOUT a MOMENT OR an INSTANT TO DISTINGUISH ONE INSTANCE from THE next GROWING EVER LOUDER AND LOUDER WITHOUT PUNCTUATION until SUDDENLY WITHOUT WARNING IT
stops.
Ruth Ozeki
#6. I've always had a problem with conventional punctuation of dialogue because it does seem to me to set it off too much from the narrative. I mean, in life, things don't stop while somebody says something, and then stuff starts up again; it's all happening at once.
Kate Grenville
#7. The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.
Victor LaValle
#8. Making the decision to leave Valve strikes me as right up there with turning down the throne to Narnia, but then call me an idealist, and I guess I probably wouldn't want to spend my whole life making new hats for Team Fortress 2 either.
Yahtzee Croshaw
#9. In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.
Russell Baker
#10. There's an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It's insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented.
Glen Duncan
#11. Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life.
Abbas Kiarostami
#12. There's a new spell you get around level 50 called "Mirror Image" which might as well be called "Reap On, Ye Fucking Reaper Man".
Yahtzee Croshaw
#13. Punctuation is to words as cartilage is to bone, permitting articulation and bearing stress.
John Lennard
#14. I don't think music affects what words I choose to type in what order, within what punctuation, at this point, because I'm rereading and editing each sentence, at this point, in my published books, probably 100-150 times each, on average, and listening to probably 20-60 different songs in that time.
Tao Lin
#15. With small-town America it's always either zombies or communists isn't it.
Yahtzee Croshaw
#16. Mr. Speaker. I said the honorable member was a liar it is true and I am sorry for it. The honorable member may place the punctuation where he pleases.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
#17. There are instances in which it might seem more appropriate or accurate to include an exclamation point with a question mark. This has given rise to a unique punctuation mark known as the "interrobang" (
Farlex International
#18. Punctuation is a fabulous tool for controlling your reader - you even get to control where they breathe. That's what I call power!
Nicola Morgan
#19. It is my destiny to know people who abuse punctuation.
Caroline Kepnes
#20. But still, it looked completely natural, as if we had been kissing at the ends of sentences for ages, while the rest of the world was still hung up on punctuation.
Jodi Picoult
#21. In another landscape, a line of spruce in the distance would appear an inkblot, a punctuation to the endless grey sentence of the morning.
Kate Walbert
#22. We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.
Russell Brand
#23. Readers of my online journal - I refuse to use the word blog because it sounds like something that lives on a riverbed and communicates through farts
Yahtzee Croshaw
#24. A Shadow's Tale - I'm going to keep calling it A Shadow's Tale because fuck America for wanting to be different and special all the time.
Yahtzee Croshaw
#25. I do not worry or even think of spelling, grammar, paragraphing, or punctuation (except periods) at this point ... In the early throes of an idea there is for me only grammar of the mind, which is a flow of thought, as natural and precise as the flow of a river to the sea.
Mary O'Neill
#26. Oh, dear." Free looked down, fluttering her eyelashes demurely. "Is my punctuation showing once more?
Courtney Milan
#27. We never let go. Ever. Even with punctuation. It's frightening. I can't see anyone from any record company ever writing an email to Neil and not getting it back, with corrections.
Chris Lowe
#28. As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.
Ann Zwinger
#29. Well, for one thing," she said, "her knowledge of punctuation begins and ends with her own beauty mark.
Melissa Bank
#30. On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.
Lynne Truss
#31. I'm petrified. Because being this close to you is doing things to me. Strange things and irrational things and things that flutter against my chest and braid my bones to ether. I want a pocketful of punctuation marks to end the thoughts he's forced into my head.
Tahereh Mafi
#32. The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.
Richard Brautigan
#33. Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.
Richard Hugo
#34. The American punctuation rule sticks in the craw of every computer scientist, logician, and linguist, because any ordering of typographical delimiters that fails to reflect the logical nesting of the content makes a shambles of their work.
Steven Pinker
#35. Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.
Fernando Pessoa
#36. Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.
Julie Burchill
#37. In this chthonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right.
Henry Miller
#38. Writing a song is almost like cheating-writing because you don't have to finish your sentences, you don't have to use any punctuation, no one's going to edit your work. It's so wide open. People just grunt and that's a song. You can kind of do anything.
Mirah
#39. Dressing, like painting, should have a residual stability, plus punctuation and surprise. Somewhere, like in Krazy Kat, you've got to throw the brick.
Richard Merkin
#41. The main problem I always have with multiplayer is that human beings are grabby, entitled, selfish, ugly, stupid, evil cockstoppers.
Yahtzee Croshaw
#42. You expect death to bring some new form of punctuation, but there it is: one small gasp. Period.
David Levithan
#43. They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#44. Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.
Mary Norris
#46. Drama, she'd learned, was like good punctuation: it underscored your point.
Kristin Hannah
#47. You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better.
Courage Knight
#48. Melville has his tics, but he always put his words in the right order. Once you fall under the spell of the writer, you look past those ticks because you are more interested in what the writer says than judging how well he grasped the editorial conventions of his time.
Mary Norris
#49. Sleep with him like that, so we were both just small, barely noticed punctuation in the huge book of life.
Harlem Dae
#50. Punctuation is the pragmatics of written language.
M.B. Parkes
#51. Punctuation has its own philosophy, just as style does, although not as language does. Style is a good understanding of language, punctuation is a good understanding of style.
George Sand
#52. you know those self-help books that give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission to love punctuation.
Lynne Truss
#53. True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection.
Barton Gellman
#54. It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn't inhibit the creative flow. When I was at school there was a huge focus on copying and testing and it put me off words and stories for years.
Michael Morpurgo
#55. I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.
Isaac Marion
#57. I bet when all the punctuation marks have a party, they quietly look at exclamation point's wife and think, that poor woman.
Dana Gould
#58. From history books you should at best believe just the punctuation. The rest is uncertain, incomplete, distorted, exaggerated or even fabricated.
A.J. Beirens
#59. Use correct grammar and punctuation. Do not use net speak, like WOT, W-O-T or U. Those messages get a lot lower reply rate.
Christian Rudder
#60. Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.
Peter L. Bergen
#61. I might not use capital letters. But I would definitely use an apostrophe ... and probably a period. I'm a huge fan of punctuation.
Rainbow Rowell
#62. New Super Mario Br - I'm just gonna call it "Steve" from now on, all right?
Yahtzee Croshaw
#63. The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me.
Jaron Lanier
#64. The one critisism the author of Slaugherhouse-Five would make of the young writer was what he called a punctuation problem. Mr. Vonnegut didn't like all the semicolons. 'People will probably figure out that you went to college
you don't have to try to prove it to them,' he told Danny.
John Irving
#65. The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.
Edgar Allan Poe
#66. Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.
Lynne Truss
#67. What sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man.
Terry Pratchett
#68. I can't help but think that the way we punctuate now is the right way - that we are living in a punctuation renaissance.
Mary Norris
#70. Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
Lynne Truss
#71. It may be tripe, but it's my tripe - and I do urge other authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.
George MacDonald Fraser
#72. Yes! Practice-singular!' the wise men screamed in unison. Three index fingers, like punctuation marks, jumped to attention in the air to emphasize their point (Life of Pi 68).
Yann Martel
#73. So the fire and its subsequent flood, wich destroyed everything left that was not flammable and added a particularly noisome flux to the survivors'problems, did not mark its end. Rather it was a fiery punctuation mark, a coal-like comma, or salamander semicolon, in a continuing story.
Terry Pratchett
#74. We have one of those conversations where every thing clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement.
Nick Hornby
#75. Punctuation are like road signs; without them we just may get lost...
Nanette L. Avery
#76. I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#77. In France, we leave a single space before and after most punctuation marks. In England, there are generally no spaces before punctuation, and one inserts a double space between sentences.
Tasha Alexander
#78. No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.
Andy Rooney
#79. My non American viewers. Who understand that the world does not consist solely of a single nation sailing across an infinite sea of migrant workers. Will no doubt have heard that the waters surrounding Brisbane got tired of waiting for people to hit the beach and decided to bring the party to us.
Yahtzee Croshaw
#80. As you can see, the hyphen is a nasty, tricky, evil little mark that gets its kicks igniting arguments in newsrooms and trying to make everyone in the English-speaking world look like an idiot - it's the Bill Maher of punctuation.
June Casagrande
#81. Every time I write these words they become a taboo,
Making sure my punctuation curve, every letter here's true,
Living my life in the margin, and that metaphor was proof.
Kendrick Lamar
#82. i thought grief would insert itself in the middle and never leave.
i know better now.
stanzas are for quitters
punctuation is for the brave.
If love is a semicolon then grief is a comma:
it won't ever stand alone,
but it will give you one breath,
in.
Kat Helgeson
#83. This chapter is dedicated to those other delights of punctuation--exquisite little squiggles, those most delightful dots and dashes, and other tragically under-appreciated tiny tidbits!
Nah. I'm just yankin' your chain.
June Casagrande
#84. With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semicolin; it's a useful little chap
Abraham Lincoln
#85. And if you want to know why great editors scare the pants off of writers everywhere, read 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss. The punctuation police are everywhere!
Dorothea Benton Frank
#86. Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Red Red Rover
#87. Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge ...
Muriel Rukeyser
#88. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#89. Accent and emphasis are the pith of reading; punctuation is but secondary.
Benjamin Disraeli
#90. Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers
Kurt Vonnegut
#91. Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.
Mary Norris
#92. Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?
Mary Norris
#93. To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation.
Lynne Truss
#94. It was cool to see reading become such a transparent act - it was as if her face had a different expression for each punctuation mark, and when there was dialogue you could see her actually listening to it in her head.
David Levithan
#95. If the semicolon is one of the neglected children in the family of punctuation marks these days, told to stay in its room and entertain itself, because mummy and daddy are busy, the apostrophe is the abused victim.
John Humphrys
#96. The question marks were piling up and I wasn't even ?uestlove yet. But Amir had questions, too, and the fishhook of the punctuation wasn't catching anything, and it wasn't straightening out either.
Ahmir Questlove Thompson
#97. You're never "keeping it real" with your lack of punctuation and proofreading, you're keeping it unintelligible.
Austin Kleon
#98. Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
Stephen Jay Gould
#99. From the reader's point of view, punctuation provides a map for one who must otherwise drive blindly past the by-ways, intersections, and detours of a writer's thought.
Mina P. Shaughnessy
#100. Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell.
Charles Dickens
