“ A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. ”
- Mistinguett- Copy
- 1.7K
“ 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- Copy
- 1.3K
“ 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- Copy
- 1.4K
“ FLY-SPECK, n. The prototype of punctuation. It is observed by Garvinus that the systems of punctuation in use by the various literary nations depended originally upon the social habits and general diet of the flies infesting the several countries. These creatures, which have always been distinguished for a neighborly and companionable familiarity with authors, liberally or niggardly embellish the manuscripts in process of growth under the pen, according to their bodily habit, bringing out the sense of the work by a species of interpretation superior to, and independent of, the writer's powers… ”
- Ambrose Bierce- Copy
- 4K
“ A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. That's the basic spelling that every woman ought to know. ”
- Mistinguett- Copy
- 2.7K
“ Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim. ”
- Elwyn Brooks White- Copy
- 887
“ When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music… ”
- Edward Albee- Copy
- 372
“ In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and the 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- Copy
- 1.8K
“ Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away… ”
- Coleman Dowell- Copy
- 446
“ Keyboard work creates a class of unwanted things - one-letter typos, failures of phrasing, bad punctuation. If you don't want to delete these entirely, you can use the Return key to push them to the bottom of the screen. ”
- Nicholson Baker- Copy
- 3.5K
- 1