Quotes & Sayings About Commas

Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas
a whole grammar made of light, for words to hard to speak. — Jodi Picoult

I, who had always prided myself on my ability to accept the fallacy of love, with all my commas, parentheses, and qualified statements, felt love grab me violently by the back of the neck and fling me straight into her arms. This blooming helplessness, which flooded me to my teeth, made me feel a lot of things, but mostly, it made me feel like a girl. — Jay Caspian Kang

teachers are no accident! You study to become a teacher! You work at it for years. So I cannot, and will not forgive teachers who are abusive, mean, and torture kids with commas and periods and misspelling, making them feel like they are less than human because they don't or can't seem to get it right. — Victor Villasenor

So, she tells me, the words dribbling out with the cranberry muffin crumbs, commas dunked in her coffee. — Laurie Halse Anderson

They don't have to be sentences, they could be divided by commas, they could be divided by semi-colons; there's a class of people who get very worked up about such things - they're lonely people - they tend to have stains down the front of their shirts - they'll tell you that dashes should be used only to subordinate complete sentences. You must forgive them. — Mark Forsyth

You mean that's your idea of desire, with all those commas? — Michael Palmer

I work through life with commas. I don't even know, do you have parentheticals? — Matthew McConaughey

Consider this, music is a collection of sounds and silences, if music was just a constant sound, it would be horrible and difficult to listen to, if music was just silence there would be nothing to listen to. In fact, rests could be easily compared to punctuation, if we ignored commas and full stops then reading and indeed speaking would become chaotic. — Michael Shaw

Anyone who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable. — Henry Watson Fowler

I have read and re-read the Arusha Declaration and found nothing wrong with it except perhaps replacing a few commas here and there ... it was clear for some of us that it would only be a mad man who would stand up and defend the Arusha Declaration. — Julius Nyerere

And a keen jealousy invades me, not of other people, but of that me made of ink and periods and commas, who wrote the novels I will write no more, the author who continues to enter the privacy of this young woman, while I, I here and now, with the physical energy I feel surging, much more reliable than the creative impulse, I am separated from her by the immense distance of a keyboard and a white page on the roller. — Italo Calvino

A good procrastination should feel like you're inserting lots and lots of commas into the sentence of your life. — Ze Frank

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

It's the periods and the commas that you have to forget about. The words never change, but the intonations change. — Martin McDonagh

Yet hypotaxis (along with reason) has been declining for a century or more. Gone are those heady and incomprehensible sentences of Johnson, Dickens, and Austen, replaced with the cruel, brutalist parataxes of writers whose aim is to agitate and distress. The long sentence is now a ridiculed rarity, usually hidden away in the Terms and Conditions, its commas and colons, clauses and caveats languishing unread and unloved. — Mark Forsyth

Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tell us (and have done so) that Shakespeare's works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks; that ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays; that dunghill is used 10 times and dullard twice; that his characters refer to love 2,259 times but to hate just 183 times; that he used damned 105 times and bloody 226 times, but bloody-minded only twice; that he wrote hath 2,069 times but has just 409 times; that all together he left us 884,647 words, made up of 31,959 speeches, spread over 118,406 lines. — Bill Bryson

I have written all the 406 pages of my book in Swahili words. Even the countries are in Swahili. Instead of 'Nigeria', for example, I have written 'Nijeria'. That is how it is written in the Swahili dictionary. This can seem as a minor detail and that people may find my mission close to ridiculous! However, single letters and commas matter. — Enock Maregesi

I have to tell you, I'm a happy man. I've lived the life I wanted to live. I've written the books I wanted to write. No publisher has ever even suggested that I change so much as a phrase - commas and periods, yes - and I suspect that I have a lot of serious readers; in fact, I know. — Charles McCarry

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason
if the worlds are in any way blurred
the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'. — Raymond Carver

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there's gonna come a time that you're gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it. — Matthew McConaughey

Repeat after me, Mr. Black: I do believe in commas. I do, I do. — Jaida Jones

Anxiety takes away all the commas and full stops we need to make sense of ourselves. — Matt Haig

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway. — Raymond Chandler

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. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound. — Edward Albee

Onstage it was always comfortable for me because that's where I felt at home. Offstage it was a different situation. I was still shy offstage and unfortunately, my shyness and my inability to communicate and really have great conversations or be part of the gang - in inverted commas - led me to the drug addiction, which, you know, blighted my life for 16 years because I thought by doing that it would make me join in. — Elton John

A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than the screams of the dying. — Adam Roberts

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool. — John Updike

CSV (fields separated by commas, double quotes used to escape commas, no continuation lines) is rarely found under Unix. — Eric S. Raymond

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise. — Michael Ondaatje

Ruth smiles, which rearranges the lines on her face. She inverts her parentheses and transforms commas into apostrophes. The pattern is that of a woman who has no regrets. — Julie Buxbaum

Many of the silliest ambiguities in the Internet memes come from newspaper headlines and magazine tag lines precisely because they have been stripped of all punctuation. Two of my favorites are MAN EATING PIRANHA MISTAKENLY SOLD AS PET FISH and RACHAEL RAY FINDS INSPIRATION IN COOKING HER FAMILY AND HER DOG. The first is missing the hyphen that bolts together the pieces of the compound word that was supposed to remind readers of the problem with piranhas, man-eating. The second is missing the commas that delimit the phrases making up the list of inspirations: cooking, her family, and her dog. — Steven Pinker

I hate commas in the wrong places. — Walt Whitman

I was working with mud and photographs and thread, eyelashes, carrots and acetone ... I was throwing radios off buildings and ... remember floating styrofoam commas down the Milwaukee River. — William Wegman

I respect commas far more than I respect congressmen. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, UP like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots ... you stop. But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes - that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity - well, they are the colons and semicolons. — Lynne Truss

The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark ... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak. — Jodi Picoult

Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs. — Mary Norris

I tried to put the displacement between parenthesis, to put a last period in a long sentence of the sadness of history, personal and public history. But I see nothing except commas. I want to sew the times together. I want to attach one moment to another, to attach childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all the presents to all absences, to attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now. — Mourid Barghouti

Speak and live in simple sentences. Bring closure
put a period to
those experiences that you don't want to carry on forever and ever. Use commas in those places where you're still growing ... and use exclamation points at the end of every lesson. — Iyanla Vanzant

This rule is difficult to apply; it is frequently hard to decide whether a single word, such as however, or a brief phrase, is or is not parenthetic. If the interruption to the flow of the sentence is but slight, the writer may safely omit the commas. But whether the interruption be slight or considerable, he must never omit one comma and leave the other. Such punctuation as — William Strunk Jr.

Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god. — Dark Jar Tin Zoo

Poets are interested primarily in death and commas. — Carolyn Kizer

Neither death nor wisdom has a full stop. There are only commas-no destinations, only waiting rooms. — Devdutt Pattanaik

My parents spent countless hours teaching me to read and write. My mother was an English teacher who patiently taught me where to put my periods and commas, and my father, who loves books more than anyone I know, taught me from an early age that books are precious and should be handled gently , "like butterflies. — Jessi Klein

When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of the curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. — Nicole Krauss

I don't care about periods or commas or misspellings at this time, even though this is English class. What I want to do is to get you so excited about reading and writing that the love of learning will be with you for the rest of your lives. I don't want to hinder your natural joy of wanting to venture into a world of books and writing and wanting to learn. — Victor Villasenor

Commas' nourishes your desires and full-stop kills. — Chandan Sharma

Words want to be sampled, relished, remembered; they need breathing space in the shape of commas, colons, semi-colons and full stops. Words are individual. They are content to string along together in sentences and paragraphs, but remain mavericks, outsiders beyond the crowd, the mob, the gang. A long novel begins with the first word. — Chloe Thurlow

1) I'm, a, comma, whore. Apparently, I throw them around like confetti. Or glitter. The title of my next book: WHY COMMAS RULE THE WORLD, AND STUFF. — Kimberly Derting

FAQ regarding my book were not about my use of commas or how the images went berserk, but about the political situation in Bosnia, about guilt and shame, about victims and perpetrators, about reasons, arguments and beliefs that led to the conflict in the first place, etc. All of this needed and still needs answering and ongoing discussions, but I mostly felt overwhelmed and unqualified to articulate anything worth more than personal experiences of the siege, of fear and refuge - all the things which I wrote about anyway. — Sasa Stanisic

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim. — E.B. White

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

We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source. — Clifton Fadiman

Really, I want you to finish this book feeling like we could become friends, if the timing was right. That's it. Oh, and by the way, you should drink while you're reading this book. If you want to play a drinking game, I suggest you take a shot when you feel like I am abusing commas. — Alida Nugent

In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm. — Fran Lebowitz

To those of us accustomed to newspaper headlines, 'PIZZAS' in inverted commas suggests these might be pizzas, but nobody's promising anything, and if they turn out to be cardboard with a bit of cheese on top, you can't say you weren't warned. — Lynne Truss

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

Using which instead of that. That introduces essential clauses while which introduces nonessential clauses. Consider the sentence "Tools that have sharp edges can cause nasty cuts." If you remove the words "that have sharp edges," the sentence loses much of its meaning. The clause is essential. Now consider "Roses, which come in many colors, have thorns on their stems." You can remove "which come in many colors" and the meaning of the rest of the sentence is intact. The clause is not essential. Another way to remember: If the clause obviously needs to be set off by commas, use which. — Charles Murray

And finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which "German philosophy"
I hope you understand its right to inverted commas- — Friedrich Nietzsche

I like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides. — Pamela Frankau

The proper use of commas is often more art than science. — Bill Walsh

When speaking aloud, you punctuate constantly - with body language.
Your listener hears commas, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks as you shout, whisper, pause, wave your arms, roll your eyes, wrinkle your brow.
In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear the way you want to be heard. — Russell Baker

Life is a series of commas, not periods. — Matthew McConaughey

A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it. — Janet Fitch

The sneaky heftiness of the book being the aggregate cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of individually insubstantial little markings, letters and numbers, commas and periods and colons and dashes, each symbol pressed upon the page by the printing machine with a slightly greater-than-expected force and darkness and permanence. — Charles Yu

All that a Pulitzer really does is give the obit writers something to put between the commas after your name. — Eddie Adams

I have been fighting over commas all my life. — Mark Helprin

I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks. — Sarah Kay

Poets are interested mostly in death and commas. — Carolyn Kizer

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc. — John Clare

Commas: commas for everyone! — Aaron Hughes

Now suppose that at the end of the page you get another instruction: count all the commas in the next page. This will be harder, because you will have to overcome the newly acquired tendency to focus attention on the letter f. — Daniel Kahneman

The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn't realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself. — Lewis Thomas

If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic. — Mary Norris

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas. — Jonathan Franzen

Theres nothing to fear but
fears themselves, such as monsters,
rejection, food poisoning, redundancy,
monsters, and oxford commas. — Craig Benzine

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style. — Louis Aragon

I have to do this, as long as it is at all possible; for if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning. — Karl Kraus

Still all "realities" and "fantasies" can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses - pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind. — Italo Calvino

Now read again: The cat, is sleeping. Let me repeat it, so that there is no cause for ambiguity: The cat comma is sleeping. The cat, is sleeping. Would you be so kind as, to sign for. On the one hand we have an example of a prodigious use of the comma that takes great liberties with language, as said commas have been inserted quite unnecessarily, but to great effect: — Muriel Barbery

To my editors, I graciously thank you. I now know "is" and "was" aren't the same thing. It's the periods and commas that got me. Can't see the darn things. — S.N. Deinscheiss

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas. — Ursula K. Le Guin

All that remains is for a few dots and commas to be crossed. — Mitchell Thomas

As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket. Take the example, 'The Highland Terrier is the cutest, and perhaps the best of all dog species.' Sensitive people trained to listen for the second comma (after 'best') find themselves quite stranded by that kind of thing. They feel cheated and giddy. In very bad cases, they fall over. — Lynne Truss

If a sentence were a picket fence, the serial commas would be posts at regular intervals. — Anonymous

I have put [the word] "discoveries" in inverted commas because scientific results, perhaps as much at least as artistic achievements, are a product of contemporary taste, driven by momentary appetites rather than eternal verities. — Stephen Bayley

The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently. — E. M. Forster

The term 'race' has deliberately been placed within inverted commas in order to stress that it is not a scientific term. Whereas it was for some time fashionable to divide humanity into four main races, and racial labels are still used to classify people in some countries (such as the USA), modern genetics tends not to speak of races. There are two principal reasons for this. First, there has always been so much interbreeding between human populations that it would be meaningless to talk of fixed boundaries between races. Second, the distribution of hereditary physical traits does not follow clear boundaries (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994). In other — Thomas Hylland Eriksen

What I had thought were signs of a broken educational system - the seemingly random placement of commas, the spastic syntax, the obnoxious overuse of quotation marks, the goofy misspelling of 'Jouralism' - were actually signs of the New Instantaneousness. 'Instant Jouralists' cannot be concerned with punctuation and grammar and spelling. That stuff just 'slows you down.' To be an 'Instant Jouralist,' you have to write as if you were being pursued by a cheetah across the Serengeti. — Nicholas G. Carr

Okay, let's put it this way. I would like to sleep with you. But it's alright if I don't sleep with you. What I'm saying is I'd like to be as fair as possible. I don't want to force anything on anybody, any more than I'd want anything forced on me. It's enough that I feel your presence or see your commas swirling around me. — Haruki Murakami

In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of the right book I meet the eyes of the most determined men; his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,
can go far and live long. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The universe does not work in phrases; don't focus on the commas; just wait for the full stop. — Jude Idada

Write the book the way it should be written, then give it to somebody to put in the commas and shit. — Elmore Leonard

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words. — Ann Zwinger

A text message has no soul, no matter how many commas you shift. — Vikki Wakefield

Nexus
I wrote stubbornly into the evening.
At the window, a giant praying mantis
rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,
begging vacantly with pale eyes;
and the commas leapt at me like worms
or miniature scythes blackened with age.
the praying mantis screeched louder,
his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.
I walked outside;
the grass hissed at my heels.
Up ahead in the lapping darkness
he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,
a brontosaurus, a poet. — Rita Dove

Donald crouched down, purple commas punctuating his vision, his windpipe feeling as if someone had shoved a flue-brush down it. — Lissa Evans

There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows. — Alice Hoffman

And, now, come to this spot
Where the spotlight is hot
And you'll see in the spotlight
A Juggling Jott
Who can juggle some stuff
You might think he could not ...
Such as twenty-two question marks,
Which is a lot.
Also forty-four commas
And, also, one dot!
That's the kind of Circus McGurkus I've got! — Dr. Seuss