Top 40 Quotes About The Semicolon
#2. A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.
Mary Norris
#3. I love the semicolon; it's unnecessary, but graceful and sophisticated.
Brian P. Cleary
#4. In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.
Lynne Truss
#5. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Alan Perlis
#6. Reagan Declares
Firmness on Gulf;
Plans are Unclear
Isn't that classic? I don't mean the semicolon; I mean, isn't that just what the world needs? Unclear firmness! That is typical American policy: don't be clear, but be firm!
John Irving
#7. Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism ... inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon) ... And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.
Matt Haig
#8. Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.
Victor Klemperer
#10. I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.
Abraham Lincoln
#11. 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
#12. After four centuries, the semicolon has finally achieved it's true calling: helping people wink online.
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#13. What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?
Lynne Truss
#14. The medals no-one will ever wear should be the ones that reflect the most. It's not an ending, it's not a period at the end of their lives, it's a semicolon. The story will continue to be told.
Jim Sheeler
#15. Well, I am more partial to a semicolon myself.
C.S. Woolley
#16. There's nothing sexier than imaging myself as an Oxford comma getting unambiguously banged. Throw in a semicolon in between two closely related independent clauses, and a volcanic love of punctuation eruption is guaranteed.
Ella Dominguez
#17. I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let's say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!
Henry Miller
#18. She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There was an operation, she'd been told. They took half your stomach out and fitted you up with a plastic bag. Better a semicolon than a full stop, some might say.
Helen Hodgman
#19. The truth is
loving someone isn't a period
it's a semicolon
and the choice you make is what comes on the other side
Hannah Moskowitz
#20. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. 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." And
Ursula K. Le Guin
#21. Another day.
How long are you gonna scroll down?
Semicolon
Smile
Sanhita Baruah
#22. The stops point out, with truth, the time of pause
A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause.
t ev'ry comma, stop while one you count;
At semicolon, two is the amount;
A colon doth require the time of three;
The period four, as learned men agree.
Cecil B. Hartley
#23. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
Lewis Thomas
#24. I was, a near grown man, sat in his dank, dark and rickety digs, feverishly hovering about the glare of a computer screen like a disorientated moth, one searching for a flaming light of recognition from someone/anyone!
Tom Conrad
#25. The dash helps to indicate that the two thoughts are intimately related, and it's less stodgy than a semicolon, which would have performed the same function (and who talks in semicolons?).
Bill Walsh
#26. A semicolon is where a writer can choose to end the sentence," she said, tucking a lock of brown hair behind her ear. "But they don't. The story goes on. It's a symbol of hope. To keep going." She smiled tremulously. "Sometimes I need that reminder.
Emma Scott
#27. Most non-programmers don't think of plaintext like that. To them, text files feel like filling in tax forms for an angry robotic auditor that yells at them if they forget a single semicolon.
Robert Nystrom
#28. I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.
Truman Capote
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#33. We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon,
Julie Schumacher
#34. When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.
Hilary Mantel
#35. But what ultimately made Yates the scourge of copy editors was his simple aversion to criticism; any emendation in his manuscript, be it a single semicolon, would cause dark alcoholic brooding, which would finally erupt in long, hectoring, semicoherent phone calls.
Blake Bailey
#36. I don't even know how to use a semicolon to this day; I use a comma every time. And you know what? If I email somebody and they get upset about me using a comma instead of a semicolon, that's not a person I want to work with anyway. And that's how you weed people out of your life.
Hannibal Buress
#37. God is not an exclamation point. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called "human grace." Somewhere along the way, we've lost sight of this.
Eric Weiner
#38. And another small point, or two actually; Aldus was the first to use the modern semicolon.
Mark Kurlansky
#40. Semicolons ... signal, rather than shout, a relationship ... A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."
George Will
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