Punctuation quotes:

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Punctuation, is? fun! -- Daniel Keyes
I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period. -- Steve Martin
Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member. -- Mary Norris
Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling. -- Lynne Truss
Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge ... -- Muriel Rukeyser
Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. -- Lynne Truss
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
The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to. -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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
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
Punctuation is the art of dividing a written composition into sentences, or parts of sentences, by points or stops, for the purpose of marking the different pauses which the sense, and an accurate pronunciation require. -- Lindley Murray
In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score. -- Ralph Richardson
I am very aware that playwrights, particularly good ones, have a intention for everything they write. Language and punctuation is used specifically, and most of the time actors can find wonderful clues about character in the rhythm and cadence of the language used. -- Laura Linney
Most people have no idea how much goes into designing a typeface. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet, usually with two versions of each, upper and lower case. Punctuation and alternate characters and numbers - let's not forget numbers - can add another 40 or so. -- Michael Bierut
Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation. -- Stephen Jay Gould
Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings. -- George Will
I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses. -- Isaac Marion
Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation. -- Lorrie Moore
The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning. -- Lynne Truss
Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences. -- Terry Pratchett
A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. -- Kurt Vonnegut
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
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
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
Hope. It's like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It's a fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. And it's the only thing in the world keeping me afloat. -- Tahereh Mafi
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
Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. -- Lynne Truss
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements. -- Ernest Hemingway
I write in the most distressingly slow way in terms of punctuation and grammar. -- Maurice Saatchi
True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection. -- Barton Gellman
I still put punctuation in my texts. If it's an 'I', I make sure it's a capital. -- Simon Cowell
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
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
Ladies, if you want to know the way to my heart... good spelling and good grammar, good punctuation, capitalize only where you are supposed to capitalize, it's done. -- John Mayer
I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them. -- Tom Wolfe
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
We are at a punctuation point in human history where the Industrial Age and institutions have finally come to their logical conclusion. They have essentially run out of gas. -- Don Tapscott
Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk? -- John McWhorter
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
I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark. -- Mario Batali
I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation. -- Brian P. Cleary
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
Yeah, well, the F-bomb - it's become as ubiquitous as the word 'like.' People just throw the word 'like' around as punctuation. And I think in a lot of everyday speech, the F-bomb has become a kind of dash or a comma. -- Geoffrey Rush
Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation. -- Hugh Laurie
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
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
With 'Scratch,' you create computer programs by snapping together graphical programming blocks, much like LEGO bricks, without any of the obscure syntax and punctuation of traditional programming languages. After creating an interactive 'Scratch' project, you can share it on the 'Scratch' website, just as you would share videos on YouTube. -- Mitchel Resnick
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back. -- James Fenton
As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being. -- Lynne Truss
I need an irony punctuation mark for the clueless. -- Gene Weingarten
Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes. -- Fernando Pessoa
Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal? -- Mary Norris
Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers -- Kurt Vonnegut
Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. -- Lynne Truss
Accent and emphasis are the pith of reading; punctuation is but secondary. -- Benjamin Disraeli
Many writers profess great exactness in punctuation who never yet made a point. -- George D. Prentice
Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life. -- Jean Giraudoux
Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar. -- Red Red Rover
They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff. -- Isaac Bashevis Singer
Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation -- Robert Frost
The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs. -- Richard Brautigan
smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell. -- Charles Dickens
In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard. -- Russell Baker
...punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. -- Lynne Truss
> CracKing: No need to yell. > FtLouie: I'm not yelling!!! > CracKing: You're using excessive amounts of punctuation, and on-line, that's like yelling. -- Meg Cabot
Give a civil servant a good case and he'll wreck it with clichÃ©s, bad punctuation, double negatives, and convoluted apology. -- Alan Clark
Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end. -- Haruki Murakami
The Biblical text does not have punctuation marks like periods and question marks. Where we end sentences is a matter of interpretation. -- Elie Wiesel
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
No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear. -- Andy Rooney
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
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
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
I realized that my kisses with Dane had become a form of punctuation, the quotations or the hasty dash at the end of a conversation -- Lisa Kleypas
Now everybody's bloggin'. I heard somebody say, "Blogging is just graffiti with punctuation." Everyone's an authority so there's nobody in power, 'cause everyone thinks they're in power. -- Ice T
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
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
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
In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel. -- Werner Herzog
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
Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk? -- John McWhorter
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
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
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
That's always been Guillermo's preference, is to have as much there practically as is humanly possible, and that digital graphic images are more a punctuation mark than they are a replacement. -- Ron Perlman
Yes, librarians use punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they'd wear it out. -- Marilyn Johnson
Balthazar was the kind of guy who used totally correct spelling and punctuation even when he was texting, which was sort of bizarrely hot. She was in serious trouble if commas could get her going. -- Claudia Gray

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