Semicolons In Quotes

#1. To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph-mere stops.

Margaret Fuller

#2. I once read that the secret to happiness is having something to do, something to look forward to, and someone to love.

Richard Paul Evans

#3. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, I should have used fewer semicolons

Lynne Truss

#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. Egypt tasted as Eleanor remembered: gritty, dry, and full of a hundred thousand secrets. She licked her lips and peered down the long corridor before her. A shadow moved across the ancient tomb walls.

E. Catherine Tobler

#6. Great. They fucked with my punctuation?" "Pam says you're overly fond of semicolons.

M. Pierce

#7. Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index.

Jasper Fforde

#8. Lust fades after climax, love lasts until breakfast!

Tom Conrad

#9. Music is the most abstract of the arts; dance, the most concrete.

Marty Rubin

#10. Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!!"' Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Different worries with different scripts, but the same baseline fear.

Russell T. Davies

#11. 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

#12. God does not make mistakes. What He says He will do, He will.

Rachelle Ayala

#13. I'm nice because I'm genuinely fond of you.

Christina Lauren

#14. Don't ever let the other stuff get in the way of your inherent skills as a kick-butt storyteller. Move the reader, make them happy and sad and excited and scared. Make them stare into space after they've put the book down, thinking about the tale that's become a part of them.

James Dashner

#15. How come you never use semicolons?" she'll say. Or: "How come you chop it all up into little sections instead of letting it flow and flow?" That sort of thing.

Kurt Vonnegut

#16. I hope that my ideas attract a lively dialogue, even if my sentences are simple. Simple sentences have always served me well. And I don't use semicolons. It's hard to read anyway, especially for high school kids. Also, I avoid irony, too. I don't like people saying one thing and meaning the other.

Kurt Vonnegut

#17. 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

#18. In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Hilary Mantel reveals: I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there's no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.

Lynne Truss

#19. I don't watch the movies I make, so I haven't seen 'Footloose' since it came out. You see this young, hungry actor, it's pretty fun. I was the only one they screen tested. It was an attempt by the director and producer to talk the head of the studio into hiring me because they didn't want me.

Kevin Bacon

#20. 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

#21. You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.

George Bernard Shaw

#22. It will reward enough for me if, by the publication of the present experiment, I have directed the attention of investigators to this subject, which still promises much for physical optics and appears to open a new field.

Joseph Von Fraunhofer

#23. 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

#24. Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

Kurt Vonnegut

#25. If colons and semicolons give themselves airs and graces, at least they also confer airs and graces that the language would be lost without.

Lynne Truss

#26. 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

#27. I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

John Clare

#28. Writing is new, relatively speaking. Story telling is ancient. Tell your story first putting aside all other worries. Leave fretting over homonyms, semicolons, and Oxford commas to editors and friends you can be bribe with baking.

Ada Maria Soto

#29. No one knows what they are anymore," he says. "If you're not in the habit of reading nineteenth-century novels, you think that the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma - semicolons have become nothing but a distraction.

John Irving

#30. I remember the rule for semicolons; the sentences on both sides have to be full ones.

Hugh Howey

#31. The slowest of us cannot but admit that the world moves.

Wendell Phillips

#32. 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

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

George Eliot

#34. In the long sentences of the president's message, semicolons followed by "yet" or "but" separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt's characteristic "on the one hand, on the other" style of crediting antagonistic views.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#35. Pretentious and over-active semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought.

Lynne Truss