Punctuation Quotes

“I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.”
― Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

“Punctuation, is? fun!”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“I comma square bracket recruit's name square bracket comma do solemnly swear by square bracket recruit's deity of choice square bracket to uphold the Laws and Ordinances of the City of Ankh-Morpork comma serve the public truƒt comma and defend the ƒubjects of his ƒtroke her bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket Majeƒty bracket name of reigning monarch bracket without fear comma favour comma or thought of perƒonal ƒafety semi-colon to purƒue evildoers and protect the innocent comma comma laying down my life if neceƒsary in the cauƒe of said duty comma so help me bracket aforeƒaid deity bracket full stop Gods Save the King stroke Queen bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket full stop.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“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, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“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

“Was that semi-colon some kind of flirty wink or just bad punctuation?”
― Azadeh Aalai

“I apologise if you all know this, but the point is many, many people do not. Why else would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying "Giant Kid's Playground", and then wonder why everyone stays away from it? (Answer: everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.)”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“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, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.

If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I don't think anyone would think that an ellipsis represents doubt or anything. I think it's more, you know, hinting at the future. What lies ahead.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“Use lots of exclamation points. They love to be overused.”
― SARK, Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity

“Whatever it is that you know, or that you don’t know, tell me about it. We can exchange tirades. The comma is my favorite piece of punctuation and I’ve got all night.”
― Rasmenia Massoud, Human Detritus

“I suppose this is a trivial matter but I do want to object to the maddening fuss-fidget punctuation which one of your editors is attempting to impose on my story. I said it before but I'll say it again, that unless necessary for clarity of meaning I would prefer a minimum of goddamn commas, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and fucking (most obscene of all punctuation marks) semi-colons. I've had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript. [Regarding "The Monkey Wrench Gang"]”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.”
― Kelli Jae Baeli, Don't Fall in Love With Your Words: Fall in Love With Your Craft

“He was… a lost apostrophe in search of a word to which he might belong”
― Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

“Note that the apostrophe in fuck's sake is necessary because fuck in this instance is a noun; therefore the word fuck is a possessive noun that takes an apostrophe.”
― Erika M. Weinert, Cursing with Style: A Dicktionary of Expletives

“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, A Place of Greater Safety

“Most authors would confess they hear an inner editor, an internal naysayer that hampers and nitpicks their attempts at first drafts. Mine has taken the form of Athena. Haughtily she peruses and dismisses every story idea I attempt: "too trite", "too formulaic", "too white". She's even harsher at the sentence level: "the rhythm's off", "that imagery doesn't work", "seriously, another em dash?”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“Life is the hesitation between an exclamation and a question. Doubt is resolved by a period.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Misplaced commas are, egregious.”
― Omar Cherif

“Jokes about full stops are not funny, period.”
― Omar Cherif

“standard forms are sometimes called conventions, conventions are mightier than armies, police, and prisons. each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper, an instrument of the Law, an unfeeling guard punching his fellow man hard in the belly.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

“Punctuation to the writer is like anatomy to the artist: he learns the rules so he can knowledgeably and controllédly depart from them as art requires. Punctuation is a means, and its end is: helping the reader to hear, to follow.”
― Thomas McCormack, The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist: A Book for Writers, Teachers, Publishers, and Anyone Else Devoted to Fiction

“Does moral progress occur incrementally? Or is it the result of sudden, punctuated social change? Given that cultural evolution, unlike biological evolution, can be guided by deliberate human innovation, both incrementalism and punctuation would seem to be live options.

... incrementalism does not mean embracing a stultifying conservatism that favors tradition over reform. Incremental, progressive moral evolution can be relatively fast and even quite groundbreaking. That is, positive moral revolutions do take place—such as the gay rights revolution ... Typically, large-scale moral progress begins with small-scale “experiments in living.” Instead of trying to re-design the culture of a society as a whole, small groups of people use moral reasoning to re-design the sub-culture of their local tribes. If the results of experiments are positive, then they can be adapted elsewhere and scaled up for larger and larger portions of society.

That being said, it’s possible that incremental moral change will not be sufficient to deal with the most serious threats to human survival. For example, perhaps something quite different—a moral black swan—is needed to address the problem of anthropogenic climate change. For this reason, we cannot be too confident that strategies that have worked in the past will also work in the future.”
― Victor Kumar, A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How it Made us Human

“What do you people have against punctuation, Caleb? You haven't *lived* till you've used a dash and a semicolon in the same sentence.”
― Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier

“He paused to kiss me and I think he meant it as a dash or an ellipsis or some other temporary punctuation, but I pressed up on my toes and made it an exclamation point.”
― Tiffany Schmidt, The Boy Next Story

“When we speak, we speak fluent, unbroken sentences, and this kind of speech doesn’t need any periods. Only God needs the period—and at the end He will use one, I am sure.”
― László Krasznahorkai