Quotes & Sayings About Dashes

It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her ... Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me. — Alan Bradley

Our fatal troika dashes on in her headlong flight perhaps to destruction and in all Russia for long past men have stretched out imploring hands and called a halt to its furious reckless course. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A daddy-long-legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe. The wind blew straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed silver as they passed through the light. A single leaf tapped hurriedly, persistently, upon the glass. There was a hurricane out at sea. — Virginia Woolf

The Bible stands apart from all other books, and has survived and will survive all the attacks of its enemies. It is like the electric torch that shines over the water of New York Bay, struck by the wing of many a seabird that dashes against it in its reckless flight, but still shining on unmoved while the foolish and reckless assailant falls bleeding and wounded at its feet. It is an anvil which has worn out many a hammer of hostile criticism, while the anvil still remains unshaken amid the wreck of all that have assailed it. — A.B. Simpson

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

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps. — Carl Sandburg

Good quote: Lee was thirty-nine, still what we would consider a fairly young man, but for the dog-for all dogs- time dashes forward at a speed we humans can hardly perceive, until the day we realize that the puppy is no longer a puppy and has outpaced us. And yet a part of us lags behind, still seeing that old dog as a young dog even when he is standing at life's finish line.(less) — Susan Orlean

The ignorant Looker-on can't imagine what the Limner means by those seemingly rude Lines and Scrawls, which he intends for the Rudiments of a Picture, and the Figures of Mathematick Operation are Nonsense, and Dashes at a Venture, to one uninstructed in Mechanicks. We are in the Dark to one another's Purposes and Intendments; and there are a thousand Intrigues in our little Matters, which will not presently confess their Design, even to sagacious Inquisitors — Joseph Glanvill

Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone." The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated. As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones. "Nor am I without sin," he says to the people. "But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it. — Orson Scott Card

This chapter is dedicated to those other delights of punctuation--exquisite little squiggles, those most delightful dots and dashes, and other tragically under-appreciated tiny tidbits!

Nah. I'm just yankin' your chain. — June Casagrande

Usain Bolt won the gold for the men's 100- and 200-meter dashes for the second Olympics in a row. You know, he has been running since he was in elementary school - kind of like Mitt Romney. — Jay Leno

It (the dash ) is a comfortable punctuation mark since even the most rigorous critic can seldom claim that any particular example of it is a misuse. Its overuse is its greatest danger, and the writer who can't resist dashes may be suspected of uncoordinated thinking. — Bergen Evans

Dashes and disappointments are not canonical Scripture. — Samuel Rutherford

I forded the Santa Fe below Fort White and headed south across the Alachua Prairie where the early Indians and Spaniards ran their cattle. To the east that early morning, strange dashes of red color shone through the blowing tops of prairie sedges where the sun touched the crowns of sandhill cranes. Their wild horn and hollow rattle drifted back on a fresh wind as the big birds drifted over the savanna. That blood-red glint of life in the brown grasslands, that long calling
why should such fleeting moments pierce the heart? And yet they do. That was what Charlie my Darling made me see. They do. — Peter Matthiessen

One must know the so-called 'lesson of a downpour.' A man, caught in a sudden rain en route, dashes along the road not to get wet or drenched. Once one takes it for granted that in rain he naturally gets wet, he can be in a tranquil frame of mind even when soaked to the skin. This lesson applies to everything. — Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Ought a man to be confident that he deserves his good fortune, and think much of himself when he has overcome a nation, or city, or empire; or does fortune give this as an example to the victor also of the uncertainty of human affairs, which never continue in one stay? For what time can there be for us mortals to feel confident, when our victories over others especially compel us to dread fortune, and while we are exulting, the reflection that the fatal day comes now to one, now to another, in regular succession, dashes our joy. — Plutarch

Her life was a scattering of small moments, bits of meaningful conversations, and bright dashes of beauty where least expected. — Robin Jones Gunn

It ruffles me a bit, not being able to tell apart my best friend from my girlfriend from this distance. But then one of the figures dashes across the sandy trail and jumps into my arms and I'm reasonably sure it's Liv and not Perry. — Veronica Rossi

It is Davy's job to decipher and transmit information into code. Sexual language is like that, Freddie thinks. Everything coded. Everything stripped down to elementary dots and dashes. — Glenn Haybittle

I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect ... of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted - first! ... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods. — Tom Wolfe

As he spoke, he whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face ... As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent. For twenty minutes or more he continued his researches, measuring with the most exact care the distance between marks which were entirely invisible to me, and occasionally applying his tape to the walls in an equally incomprehensible manner. — Arthur Conan Doyle

The usual bizarre bio-mix of who-knew-how-many planetary-original blood-lines, all tangled inextricably together with those from an equally unfathomable number of others, boosted with genetech, aug., dashes of chimeric and a hint of some machine in there too, depending.

And it didn't doubt that every single one of them would find it absolutely fascinating to stare into a fire, even if that was one thing they were unlikely ever to encounter on a ship. The urge would still be there, though; — Iain M. Banks

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

At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But, if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat. — Mark Twain

From the early days of the telegraph, to be a telegrapher was a job, and there weren't many of those folks. They could recognize each other's style by their dots and dashes. — Adam Rogers

Grow up, asshole,' Declan told Ronan. He slapped the mask on Matthew's face.
That was the nightmare...
The primitive mask was an effortless part of Matthew's face...
'It'll be okay,' Ronan told his brother. 'You can live like that. You can just never take it off.'...
Declan tore the mask off...
Matthew's face was lines and dashes. It was not bloody; it was not horrific; it was simply not a face, and so it was terrible. He was not a person, he was just a drawn thing. — Maggie Stiefvater

John Bunyan: "But one day, as I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Thy righteousness is in heaven; and methought withal, I saw, with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God's right hand; there, I say, as my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was adoing, mGod could not say of me, He wants my righteousness, for that was just before him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever." (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 35-36) — John Bunyan

Greatness stands upon a precipice, and if prosperity carries a man never so little beyond his poise, it overbears and dashes him to pieces. — Seneca The Younger

My life," she said dramatically, with her eyes closed, "is one heaping bowl of warmed-over despair, seasoned with equal dashes of aggravation and angst! — Rick Detorie

Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him. (By the way: facing the wall, such gentlemen
that is, the "direct" persons and men of action
are genuinely nonplussed. For them a wall is not an evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not an excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very glad, though we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule. No, they are nonplussed in all sincerity. The wall has for them something tranquillising, morally soothing, final
maybe even something mysterious ... but of the wall later.) — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

During these mad dashes to the wall phone in the kitchen she hadn't time to fall but with fantastical grace and dexterity wrenched herself upright in midfall and continued running (dogs whimpering, yapping hysterically in her wake, cats scattering wide-eyed and plume-tailed) before the telephone ceased it's querulous ringing
though frequently she was greeted with nothing more than a derisive dial tone, in any case. — Joyce Carol Oates

How you start is important, very important, but in the end it is how you finish that counts. It is easier to be a self-starter than a self-finisher. The victor in the race is not the one who dashes off swiftest but the one who leads at the finish. In the race for success, speed is less important than stamina. The sticker outlasts the sprinter in life's race. In America we breed many hares but not so many tortoises. — B.C. Forbes

Some tell me I'll break my ankle on my high heels - but I live in them. I'm known for doing speed dashes and leaps and bounds in heels. No problem. — Kylie Bax

It was expected, however, that [Erasmus] should make some reply and give some definition. But instead, by availing himself of a rhetorical transition, he drags us who knew nothing of rhetoric away with him, as if the matter at issue here were of no moment, but simply a lot of quibbling, and dashes bravely out of the crowded court, crowned with ivy and laurel. — Martin Luther

Our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane. Less merciful than man, God never opens the window. — Jules Renard

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E's, nine thousand T's, and only two hundred Z's. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text. — James Gleick

When a prisoner sees the door of his dungeon open, he dashes for it without stopping to think where he shall get his dinner outside. — George Bernard Shaw

But maybe it's only been a brief separation that feels like years. Like a solo car ride that takes all night but feels like a lifetime. Watching all those highway dashes flying by at seventy miles an hour, your eyes becoming lazy slits and your mind wandering over the memory of a whole lifetime-past and future, childhood memories to thoughts of your own death-until the numbers on the dashboard clock do not mean anything more. And then the sun comes up and you get to your destination and the ride becomes the thing that is no longer real, because that surreal feeling has vanished and time has become meaningful again. — Matthew Quick

The softest thing in the world dashes against and overcomes the hardest; that which has no (substantial) existence enters where there is no crevice. — Lao-Tzu

But it is rather derogatory that your dwelling-place should be only a neighborhood to a great city,
to live on an inclined plane.I do not like their cities and forts, with their morning and evening guns, and sails flapping in one's eye. I want a whole continent to breathe in, and a good deal of solitude and silence, such as all Wall Street cannot buy,
nor Broadway with its wooden pavement. I must live along the beach, on the southern shore, which looks directly out to sea,
and see what that great parade of water means, that dashes and roars, and has not yet wet me, as long as I have lived. — Henry David Thoreau

Well,
me," he said. "A
ing wizard. I hate
ing wizards!" "You shouldn't
them, then," muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes. — Terry Pratchett

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

I detected instantly that she didn't like me. It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he's smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signalling that Mary detesting me. — Alan Bradley

if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you're robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. Only the confidence that you're done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown. — Cal Newport

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

I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor's child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy. — Vladimir Nabokov

I've had broken bones and cuts and dashes and tears from movies, but when I was five, my mom put the biscuits up high so we wouldn't be helping ourselves. So, one day I asked to stand up on a chair to get a biscuit, and it fell, and the corner of the chair went right into the side of my eye, and it made a big hole in there. — Gerard Butler

I think of what it means to be a teenager in America, necessarily pushing boundaries, making expected mistakes. Here there is no margin for error: a mistake, no matter how insignificant, dashes any small hopes to break the cycle of poverty. Here in Kibera the world is relentless and unforgiving. — Jessica Posner

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

The wind shrieks, the wind grieves; It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again; And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain. — Conrad Aiken

Today for show & tell, I've brought in some flash cards I made. Each card has a letter followed by several dashes. When I show the card, you yell out the vulgar, obscene or blasphemous word they stand for! ... Ready? ... She's such a hypocrite about building vocabulary. — Bill Watterson

Music overwhelmed me, soaked into my skin like water. I didn't have words for the squiggles and dashes across the pages, or the way his fingers stretched across the keys to make my heart race. If I could hear only one thing for the rest of my life, this was what I wanted. — Jodi Meadows

Not so bad this ending because one is getting used to endings: life like Morse, a series of dots and dashes, never forming a paragraph. — Graham Greene

A novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. — Virginia Woolf

We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Powell wasn't overstating their ignorance. At this point, they had no clear idea how far they had come or how much canyon lay ahead of them. They did not know how many turns the river would make, how many rapids there might be, or whether their supplies would sustain them through the time it would take to negotiate these obstacles. And they had no way of knowing that their most serious challenges lay ahead. Just — Kevin Fedarko

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below. — Arthur Conan Doyle

The rat scuttles, the big cat creeps, the monkey dashes,
The bat glides, the white crane soars, the lizard darts,
And the owl hoots
In the middle of the night. — Sandy Fussell

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke ...
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere. — Philip Larkin

In the same way that Morse code reduces written language to dots and dashes, the spoken version of the code reduces speech to just two vowel sounds. The key word here is two. Two types of blinks, two vowel sounds, two different anything, really, can with suitable combinations convey all types of information. — Charles Petzold