Exclamation Quotes & Sayings

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

Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both. — Criss Jami

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. — Elmore Leonard

Cooper leaned back a little then reached out and tugged at my size too large pink Minnie Mouse sweatshirt. "You really wanted to put an exclamation mark on the no sex thing, huh?"
Balking, I smacked his hand. "Screw you. This is my sexiest outfit. It's frigging Minnie Mouse, Cooper. The chick exudes sex."
Grinning wider now, he played with my hair. "You can't know what I think about you."
"What does that mean? You're so mysterious that a mere mortal like me can't fathom your giant brain?"
"Sums it up pretty well," he said, twirling my hair around his fingers. "You get feisty after a shower. I'll have to remember that. — Bijou Hunter

After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his snuffs and grunts and barks. Every twitch of the ears is a question or statement, every wag of the tail is an exclamation. — Robert McCammon

It was not an exclamation so much, I think, as it was a warding off, an exertion of language upon ignorance and disorder. — N. Scott Momaday

Insufferable woman!" was her immediate exclamation. "Worse than I had supposed. Absolutely insufferable! Knightley! - I could not have believed it. Knightley! - never seen him in her life before, and call him Knightley! - and discover that he is a gentleman! — Jane Austen

As a soldier in the US Army, I was prepared to do whatever was asked of me because I believed, down to my soul, that the uniform I'd wear as a Ranger represented the defense of liberty and freedom, and the country I love. I'd chosen to serve because I could fight and because until wars stopped happening, people like me were needed. I had zero problem doing whatever it took to keep harm from coming to innocent people. Zero problem. Period, exclamation point, and freakin' hooah. — Veronica Rossi

In Gospel grammar, death is not an exclamation point, merely a comma. — Neal A. Maxwell

All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers. — Emile M. Cioran

She moved with such purpose it was as though she walked with exclamation marks. — Gail Carriger

I retraced my steps, walked up to her, and in another moment would have certainly said, "Madam!" if I had not known that that exclamation had been made a thousand times before in all Russian novels of high life. It was that alone that stopped me. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Shakespeare's ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece, where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the dew on the grass in Venus, but the ill-lit world of Livy's Rome darkens Lucrece. The first poem lives out of doors; the second is in a permanent chiaroscuro. — Peter Porter

I'm no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation. — Clarice Lispector

Before this regime started, I had a reasonably long password - about eleven characters long, if I recall correctly. But the constant pressure to make a new password has steadily degraded my ingenuity. In 2012 I gave up and just made each password into the month that the e-mail reminder arrived. So when the March e-mail password reset reminder arrived, I changed my password to March2012! (with the requisite exclamation point to satisfy the symbol police). In June, I changed it to 2012June?, and on like that. I had dropped to nine easily guessable characters. — Julia Angwin

Once she had thrown a square of birch bark into the fire when her father came in the door. He might then have asked her why her quill pen had shaped a row of straight and crooked question marks and after each one an exclamation point
in rows of ten, perhaps forty running along
?! ?! ?! ?!
arranged in pairs or couples. If he had asked her what is this folderol and what can this nonsense mean she would have said the same she said when shaping them with her pen, one pair, one couple after another. Each question mark stands for my ignorance and asks if I may learn and know the answer. And each exclamation point stands for my surprise at how little I know, my amazement at my vast ignorance, my utter astonishment at how much there is for me to learn. — Carl Sandburg

Well, let's go! And we go like this now, hand in hand." "And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!" Kolya cried once more ecstatically, and once more all the boys joined in his exclamation. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations. — J.D. Salinger

How do you end a story that's not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed? What if you kill something breathing and breathe life into something the author wanted to eliminate? How do you get inside the mind of a person who isn't there? Fill the shoes of someone who will never again fill his own? — Shaila M. Abdullah

And then something blossomed deep within and opened almost like the multitude petals of a rose, pushing back the tension in rippling waves as they bloomed until she surrendered to relaxation with a soft exclamation of surprise — Mary Balogh

Mario, I wrote, to give myself courage, had not taken away the world, he had taken away only himself. And you are not a woman of thirty years ago. You are of today, take hold of today, don't regress, don't lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don't give into distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He's gone, you're still here. You'll no longer enjoy the gleam of his eyes, of his words, but so what? Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don't let yourself break like an ornament, you're not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack. La femme rompue, ah, rompue, the destroyed woman, destroyed, shit. My job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself. — Elena Ferrante

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

There is a specific feeling that comes about during the dying embers of a relationship. Different from the Monday morning quarrels before work because you two are tired, different from the "I'm not going to talk to you for a while because I am mad at you" silences. Breaks ups happen instantly, yet the process occurs over a gradual period of time, with tear by tear until what was once whole, rips into two. Breakups are the disappointment we feel when we wanted our lover to finish the story with an exclamation mark, but instead are left with a question mark. — Forrest Curran

What was the apostrophe doing there? Did the doctor own the Meescham? And what was it with exclamation marks? Did people not know what they were for? Surprise, anger, joy - that's what exclamation marks were for. They had nothing to do with who resided where. — Kate DiCamillo

So far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. It is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading LAUGHTER to a studio audience. — Miles Kington

Some of the shrewdest insight into natural processes have been greeted at the outset by the exclamation 'But that's ridiculous'. — Lewis Thomas

Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out, 'this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!' But in this exclamation, I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company-I mean hell. — John Adams

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

What is it with young women and exclamation points and smiley faces! So afraid of appearing somber, always wanting to appear light and happy and sparkling, even when they are dying inside. Not ever being able to escape the mask that smiles. She wants to write, really write someday. But she is not fully formed. So she does not write. Not really. Unless attempting to live is a form of attempting to write. The agony of becoming. This is what she experiences. The young girl. She would like to be someone, anyone else. She wants, vaguely, to be something more than she is. But she does not know what that is, or how one goes about doing such a thing. — Kate Zambreno

When you two go out walking, do you like to have the people on the street say, 'Look at these nice twins'?" Immediately the little girl exclaimed, "No, I want them to say, 'Look at these two different people!'" This spontaneous exclamation, obviously revealing something very important to the little girl, cannot be explained by saying that the child wanted attention; for she would have gotten more attention if she had dressed as a twin. It shows, rather, her demand to be a person in her own right, to have personal identity - a need which was more important to her even than attention or prestige. — Rollo May

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses. — Isaac Marion

Dolly was the exclamation point in my life. She made me feel things: adoration, anger, frustration. She was always in love and it made her glow. — Megan Mayhew Bergman

Love the overuse of exclamation points!!!! Yes!!! They add a lot of emphasis!!! to what your character is saying!!! — L.R.W. Lee

If you make every sentence an exclamation or put every verb in 'bold,' then nothing stands out. — Michael S. Horton

I do not think it is logical to try and outsmart the smartest people. Instead, my weapons are irony and paradox. The joy of life is partly in the strange and unexpected. It is in the constant exclamation 'Who would have thought it?' — Hugh Jackman

Use lots of exclamation points. They love to be overused. — SARK

Reg coughed repressively.Habit had made of the standard nouns and adjectives in his own vocabulary something merely conventional,like italics or points of exclamation.He sometimes found Laurie's conversation highly obscene,and would have voiced his disapproval to anyone he had liked less. — Mary Renault

So a little pain on our quest was good. But I had to promise to not let you get killed." "I didn't think Lucifer cared." "He doesn't." Of course not. "My dad," Adexios stated with assurance. Blonde hair went whipping from side to side. "Try again. You're close." "You listened to my mom?" His exclamation emerged a tad high-pitched. "Why the hell would you do that? — Eve Langlais

is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in. — Lynne Truss

I love to accent movement. The eye goes to where the white is - you know, the glove. And the feet, if you're dancing, you can put an exclamation point on your movement if it has a bit of light on it. So I wore the white socks. And for the design of the jacket, I would sit with the people who made the clothes and tell them where I wanted a button or a buckle or a design. — Michael Jackson

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Each word that she left behind is precious, including the simple three I rediscovered a few days after Marina's memorial service. Her long-forgotten note, scrawled with a dry-erase marker on the back of a BB&N book slip and left on my desk when she was visiting from college, simply read, "Marina was here!" Marina was here. Yes, she was, in so many ways. And with an exclamation point. My hope is that through this book and Marina's many legacies, we may all still hear her and be inspired by how she used her fleeting time to be passionately, vibrantly, fully here. - Beth McNamara August 2014 — Marina Keegan

Jesus Christ: A common exclamation indicating surprise, disgust, anger or bewilderment. — Chaz Bufe

And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider's web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving - to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing - light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves. — Vladimir Nabokov

Parvaneh gives him a look studded with a long line of question marks and exclamation marks, — Fredrik Backman

When the Jews wanted to make something emphatic, instead of adding an exclamation point or using italics, they would simply repeat it. — R.C. Sproul

Rosethorn had gone to her room the moment Niko started to cough. Now she returned with her syrup and a firm look in her eye. "I thought you were having trouble last night. Drink this." She poured some into a cup and held it out to him.
Niko looked at it as if she offered him rotten fish. "I am fine. I am per-" He couldn't even finish the sentence for coughing.
"It's not bad," said Tris, crossing her fingers behind her back. "Really, tastes like-like mangoes."
Niko looked at her, then took the cup and downed its contents. The four watched with interest as his cheeks turned pale, then scarlet. "That's terrible (exclamation point)" he cried, his voice a thin squeak.
"Maybe I was thinking of some other syrup," Tris remarked with a straight face. — Tamora Pierce

The whole time I was hoping my silence would fit yours and exclamation marks would gently float across time and space so that boundaries would be crossed; the whole time I was praying you would read my eyes and understand what I was never able to understand. See, we were never about butterflies. We've always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant. — Anna Akhmatova

His own exclamation: "Women should be free - as free as we are," struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore - in the heat of argument - the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern. — Edith Wharton

What can be the meaning of that emphatic exclamation?" cried he. "Do you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress that is laid on them, as nonsense? I cannot quite agree with you there. What say you, Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make extracts. — Jane Austen

Do we want blanks, asterisks and exclamation marks which people can fill in with their own imaginations, or are we prepared and strong enough to tolerate, even if we do not approve, the strong Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language? — John Mortimer

I will dance a little. I will move with the wind. I will give my body to my love and celebrate that we have substance beyond the idea of ourselves. We can move. We can touch. This is my physical exclamation point. This is how I can awaken my mind to the possibilities in the day. — Mary Anne Radmacher

Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government. Instead, therefore, of exclaiming against the ambition of kings, the exclamation should be directed against the principle of such governments; and instead of seeking to reform the individual, the wisdom of a nation should apply itself to reform the system. — Thomas Paine

Samson's grace and surefootedness at breakneck paces was the closest Roxleigh had ever come to some semblance of peace in his life. His head was never clearer, his nerves were never calmer, and his mind was never more unbound than when he rode Samson. He listened to the horse's steady breathing, the exertion of his exhalations, and the steady beat of his hooves, punctuated by the swift silence of the jumps and the exclamation of the landing, like a staccato symphony. His mind unfurled its stressed tethers with the smooth action of Samson at full speed. — Jenn LeBlanc

The ladies egged him on; in Eve's name, they dared him; so he made love with discreet verbs and light nouns, delicate conjunctions. They begged; they defied him to define ... define everything. They could not be scandalized - impossible, they said. Indecent prepositions such as in, on, up, merely made them smile, and the roundest exclamation broke upon them like a bubble's kiss, a butterfly's. Smooth and creamy adjectives enabled them to lick their lips upon the crudest story. How charmingly you speak, Reverend Furber, how much you've seen of this wicked world, and how alive you are to it, they said. — William H Gass

The way you live your day is a sentence in the story of your life. Each day you make the choice whether the sentence ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. — Steve Maraboli

I write music with an exclamation point! — Richard Wagner

Because there's no pain yet. There's too much adrenalin and rhetoric in his bloodstream. There's whole chunky paragraphs of What it Means to King and Country. Never mind God. There's fine speeches still pumping up along his arteries, principal and subordinate clauses, the adjectival, the adverbial, in gorgeous Latinate construction and hot breath. It's the Age of Speeches. There's exclamation marks doing needle dancing in his brain, and so he gets twenty yards into the war. — Niall Williams

Note: When reading dry political theory, such as the texts you will find on the following pages, it may be useful to apply the Exclamation Point Test from time to time, to determine if the material you are reading is actually relevant to your life. To apply this test, simply go through the text replacing all the punctuation marks at the ends of the sentences with exclamation points. If the results sound absurd when read aloud, then you know you're wasting your time. — CrimethInc.

You can't have many exclamation points left,' thought Anne, 'but no doubt the supply of italics is inexhaustible. — L.M. Montgomery

What the foul fiend is the meaning of all this? — E.D.E.N. Southworth

Never use three exclamation points when one will do. — Christine Edwards

Changing the world, one exclamation point at a time. — Jon Glaser

Quillonians were a reclusive race, proud, prone to drama, and violent when cornered. A couple of them had stayed at my parents' inn, and as long as everything went their way, they were perfectly cordial, but the moment any small problem appeared, they would start putting exclamation marks at the end of all their sentences. My mother didn't like dealing with them. She was very practical. If you brought a problem to her, she'd take it apart and figure out how best to resolve it. From what I remembered, Quillonians didn't always want their problems resolved. They wanted a chance to shake their clawed fists at the sky, invoke their gods, and act as if the world was ending. — Ilona Andrews

It's always nice to end your sentences with an exclamation mark, and not a comma. — Joey Santiago

November 4, 1987 Chicago I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read I LOVE KILLING COMMUNISTS. The word love was replaced by a heart shape I'm guessing they'll put on the typewriter keyboard any day now, right beside the exclamation point. The bumper sticker was on a Ford Fairlane on Montrose Avenue. — David Sedaris

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

A tired exclamation mark is a question mark. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation. — Samuel Johnson

This is what they mean by epiphanies. I am almost thinking in exclamation points. — Claire Hennessy

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

She wagged a finger at him. "You're mispronouncing that word."
"Your pardon?" He groped, trying to remember what he'd said. "Suffragette? How does one pronounce it, then?"
"Suffragette," she said, "is pronounced with an exclamation point at the end. Like this: 'Huzzah! Suffragettes! — Courtney Milan

Cut out all these exclamation jokes. An explanation point is like laughing at your own joke. I'm going to delete you from my contacts if you keep sending solely emoji texts. You're a grown-ass man. — F Scott Fitzgerald

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke. — Mark Twain

Huzzah." Free met his gaze with a flat stare. "Crime! Right now that crime is blackmail, but it won't be blackmail much longer."
"No? How do you figure?"
"With luck and a good amount of arsenic ... ?" She gave him a smile of her own. "Soon it will be: 'Huzzah! Murder!' Now there's a cause that deserves my exclamation point. — Courtney Milan

(On Panic Attacks) And once I had my first one with Maegan, they crept up about once a month. And without warning. It was worse than getting my period. In fact, I called it my exclamation point. — Mamrie Hart

In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred,It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present. — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

In other nightmares, in his everyday reality, Victor watched his father take a drink of vodka on a completely empty stomach. Victor could hear that near-poison fall, then hit, flesh and blood, nerve and vein. Maybe it was like lightning tearing an old tree into halves. Maybe it was like a wall of water, a reservation tsunami, crashing onto a small beach. Maybe it was like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Maybe it was like all that. Maybe. But after he drank, Victor's father would breathe in deep and close his eyes, stretch, and straighten his neck and back. During those long drinks, Victor's father wasn't shaped like a question mark. He looked more like an exclamation point. — Sherman Alexie

It's not just an exclamation, but it's a rejection of everything to do with Christmas, with the spirit of Christmas, with gift-giving, with generosity. — Patrick Stewart

Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark. — Amos Oz

Men can't use exclamation points in texts... it's weird. We also don't say [stuff] like 'yay'. — Jacinta Howard

Did you hear that, Bernard?" she said, her hand half over the phone. "They're paying her to sleep now."
I could hear my father's exclamation. "Praise the Lord. She's found her dream career. — Jojo Moyes

NO SHORTS or SANDAL!! This for your own protection.
Tomorrow's boot camp will be something SPECIAL! Meet in front of the maintenance shed at the north end of the quad at 10 A.M! Latecomers will be left behind and this is a day you will not want to miss!
- Adara -
I roll my eyes. Besides her overuse of exclamation points and her tendency to yell, the idea that we're doing "something special" in camp tomorrow is not exciting. It's terrifying. — Tera Lynn Childs

Extroverts want us to have fun, because they assume we want what they want. And sometimes we do. But "fun" itself is a "bright" word, the kind of word that comes with flashing lights and an exclamation point! One of Merriam-Webster's definitions of "fun" is "violent or excited activity or argument." The very word makes me want to sit in a dimly lit room with lots of pillows - by myself. — Laurie A. Helgoe

And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. — Terry Pratchett

[She was] like an exclamation mark in human form. — Jenna Evans Welch

People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays; it's one exclamation point to another. — Tom Wolfe

What sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man. — Terry Pratchett

Please come to Destination I'm not doin well Exclamation — Nicki Minaj

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you - every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life. — Mark Twain

it s cheerio
my deario
that pulls a
lady through
exclamation point — Don Marquis

The kiss wasn't an intrusion; it was a question. Morrigan answered it with an exclamation mark. — P.C. Cast

Running a bit late meet at my place around 7?'
Smiling at the phone, my fingers fumbling over the keypad quickly,
'Yup-see you there!'
I deleted the exclamation mark and counted to thirty before I allowed myself to press send. — Jessica Shirvington

We only live once, but once is enough if we do it right. Live your life with class, dignity, and style so that an exclamation, rather than a question mark signifies it! — Gary Ryan Blair

There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at - that light, for example. — Virginia Woolf

The knowledgeable person lives with a question mark '?' and the man of awe and wonder lives with an exclamation mark. — Rajneesh

How shall I ever tell Aunt Shaw?' she whispered, after some time of delicious silence.
'Let me speak to her.'
'Oh, no! I owe it to her, - but what will she say?'
'I can guess. Her first exclamation will be, "That man!" '
'Hush!' said Margaret, 'or I shall try and show you your mother's indignant tones as she says, "That woman!" — Elizabeth Gaskell

I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin. — Neil Gaiman

The blood pumping through her veins when she landed a vault like that one always felt like exclamation points. — Caela Carter

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. — Chuck Klosterman