Parentheses Or Quotes & Sayings

The bath is one of the places I prefer, certainly not a place I leave readily, a place where one can close the door and remove oneself, put oneself in parentheses, as it were, from the rest of humanity. It is a place for reading and thinking, where one's mind wanders easily, where time seems temporarily suspended. — Sheila Kohler

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter. — D.H. Lawrence

The truth was that upsilamba was one of Nabokovs fascinating creations, possibly a word he invented. I said I associate Upsilamba with the impossible joy of a suspended leap. Yassi, who seemed excited for no particular reason, cried out that she always thought it could be a name of a dance- you know, "C'mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me". Manna suggested that the word upsilamba evoked the image of small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake. Nima added in parentheses, Just so you won't forget me, although you have barred me from your class: an upsilamba to you too! For Azin it was a sound, a melody. Mahashid described an image of three girls jumping rope and shouting" Upsilamba" with each leap. For Sanaz, the word was a small African boy's secret magical name. Mitra wasn't sure why the word reminded her of the paradox of a blissful sigh. And for Nassrin it was a magic code that opened the door to a secret cave filled with treasures. — Azar Nafisi

Sloppy script and felt a pang of guilt. She started to close the notebook but paused in thought. It didn't feel right. It didn't seem ... truthful. With a heavy hand and a heavy heart, she added in parentheses — Chanda Hahn

On the way home, I saw a fist fight between an adverb and a pair of parentheses.
I kept on walking. — Peter James West

Bowie talks in great, voluble torrents, darting from one topic to the next, parenthesizing and then parenthesizing the parentheses, as if he has too many ideas for one conversation. — Sean Egan

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals. — Pico Iyer

I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period). — Sarah Vowell

I hereby certify that the bearer of this note, Nikolai Ivanovich, spent the night in question at Satan's ball, having been lured there in a transportational capacity ... Hella, put in parentheses! And write 'hog.' Signed- Behemoth. — Mikhail Bulgakov

Throughout our lives friends enclose us like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries; crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses and parts of them always remain. Friendship asks the truth and wants the truth, hollows and fills, ages with us, and we through it. It cradles us like family. It is ecology and mystery and language - all three. Our grown-up friendships - especially the really meaningful ones- model for our children what we want them to have throughout their lives. — Beth Kephart

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses. — John Irving

Her hair is longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of words I was not around to hear. — Jodi Picoult

I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way. — Beth Kephart

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses. — George Eliot

I wanted intimacy in caps lock but I got it in parentheses. We curled into each other, upside down, my empty spaces filled by another. "Give me the three minute version of your life story," he said. I nailed it it one then refused to throw the question back as etiquette governs. He wanted to know where I'd been. I wanted to know who he was. — Eleni Zoe

I wanted him to know that I saw him, a guy who, even with a tear-streaked face, seemed to have two tiny smiles framing his eyes like parentheses, a guy on the ground pantomiming his death to remind the world he was alive. — Jason Reynolds

He is broken in three ways, sometimes four. I count them.
-He believes himself to be human, but is not actually. At least not anymore. This is similar to the way he believes himself to be alive.
-He has a grim affinity for drugs. This comes with no caveat and no parentheses. This is just a fact of life.
-He is doggedly unhappy and once decided to kill himself. Sadly, he has not really stopped.
-On certain occasions when these first three things have ceased to be bad enough, he loves me. The other sins are commonplace, forgivable under a big enough umbrella. This fourth is irrevocable. Unconscionable. In a word, it is utterly damning. — Brenna Yovanoff

Jack seemed kind. He was craggy and athletic, with lines like parentheses around his mouth, as if everything he wanted to say was an afterthought. — Sarah Addison Allen

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

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

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

Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk. — Carol Shields

You know, in the sentence of humanity this place needs to be a parentheses. And when I say parentheses I mean I'm talking like you go around it. Leave it alone. Let it exist. And what I want people to see with this film is not only a respect for this place from the bottom of my heart. — DJ Spooky

You cannot put patience and experience into a parenthesis, and, omitting them, bring hope out of tribulation. — Alexander MacLaren

By itself, 1 Corinthians 15 just wouldn't mean much. He wants the appearances of 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 to be read as if they had in parentheses after them 'See Luke 24; Matthew 28; John 21.' — Robert M. Price

(Parentheses speak
More than we dare say out loud
Why, oh, why is that?) — Megan McCafferty

A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case. — E. M. Forster

I'd even had business cards made up reading, ABIGAIL COOPER, P.I. with teeny-weeny little letters underneath in parentheses spelling out PSYCHIC INTUITIVE. Most people think I'm trying to be clever. The truth is, I'm a chickenshit. — Victoria Laurie

There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for - the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound. — Margaret Atwood

He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.
"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader. — George Eliot

Brackets come in various shapes, types and names:
1 round brackets (which we call brackets, and the Americans call parentheses)
2 square brackets [which we call square brackets, and the Americans call brackets] — Lynne Truss

A few words which he wanted to emphasize were put into brackets or set off by quotation marks. My first impulse was to point out to him that it was ridiculous to put slang words and expressions between quotation marks, for that prevents them from entering the language. But I decided not to. When I received his letters, his parentheses made me shudder. At first, it was a shudder of slight shame, disagreeable. Later (and now, when I reread them) the shudder was the same, but I know, by some indefinable, imperceptible change, that it is a shudder of love- it is both poignant and delightful, perhaps because of the memory of the word shame that accompanied it in the beginning. Those parentheses and quotation marks are the flaw on the hip, the beauty mark on the thigh whereby my friend showed that he was himself, irreplaceable, and that he was wounded. — Jean Genet

I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people. — Margaret Atwood

I am one of those that always get accidentally guillotined when the Great Day of Liberation comes, because ... I guess ... I am full of parentheses. Revolutions can't abide parentheses. — James Tiptree Jr.

Life is such an effort, Child. It's a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which you pay a cruel price. — Oriana Fallaci

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses. — Alan Perlis

I feel I'm living in parentheses — Steven Wilson

The Christian will find his parentheses for prayer even in the busiest hours of life. — Richard Cecil