Exclamation Mark Quotes & Sayings

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

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

hadn't grown into being a woman, she had become a woman with an exclamation mark, the sort of hardy feminine brute of the Pleistocene from which all women, great and frail, are descended. — J. Ryan Stradal

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

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality! — Lewis Thomas

Here is an appropriate use of the exclamation mark:
The last thing he expected when the elevator door opened was the snarling tiger that leapt at him.
"Ahhhhh!"
...
In almost all situations that do not involve immediate physical danger or great surprise, you should think twice before using an exclamation mark. If you have thought twice and the exclamation mark is still there, think about it three times, or however many times it takes until you delete it. — Howard Mittelmark

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

A mind without a secret is with a question mark! A mind with so many secrets shall attract an exclamation one day! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

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

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

(If you've been puzzled by the name !Kung Bushman, the exclamation mark is not an expression of premature astonishment; it's just how linguists denote a click.) — Jared Diamond

she was the kind of woman
who only gave herself away in small doses,
leaving men wandering like little children
at all that she was.
she tortured them with the sound
of her fading footsteps,
each one an exclamation mark
to a sentence the world tragically
instilled in her long ago
"find something beautiful, then
let it go. — Christopher Poindexter

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

There's an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It's insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented. — Glen Duncan

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. Thats basic spelling that every woman ought to know. — Mistinguett

There are instances in which it might seem more appropriate or accurate to include an exclamation point with a question mark. This has given rise to a unique punctuation mark known as the "interrobang" ( — Farlex International

I read once that this man was in the chair and when the electrocutioner threw the switch the smoke came out of the man's head and formed a question mark over him and everybody said it was an omen, that maybe he didn't commit the murder they killed him for."
"Well," I said, "if they catch me, there won't be any question mark. There'll be an exclamation point. — Elliott Chaze

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

Reepicheep: Unhand the tail. Aslan the Great gave me this tail and no one, repeat, no one, touches the tail. Period, exclamation mark! — C.S. Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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