Punctuation Comma Quotes & Sayings

Whatever it is that you know, or that you don't know, tell me about it. We can exchange tirades. The comma is my favorite piece of punctuation and I've got all night. — Rasmenia Massoud

The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid. — Edgar Allan Poe

THE WONDERS OF PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING 1 ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY ABOUT THE COMMA! 2 I BEFORE E COMPLETELY SORTED OUT! 3 THE MYSTERY OF THE SEMICOLON REVEALED!!! 4 SEE THE AMPERSAND! (SMALL EXTRA CHARGE) 5 FUN WITH BRACKETS! ** WILL ACCEPT VEGETABLES, EGGS, AND CLEAN USED CLOTHING — Terry Pratchett

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

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

There's nothing sexier than imaging myself as an Oxford comma getting unambiguously banged. Throw in a semicolon in between two closely related independent clauses, and a volcanic love of punctuation eruption is guaranteed. — Ella Dominguez

So the fire and its subsequent flood, wich destroyed everything left that was not flammable and added a particularly noisome flux to the survivors'problems, did not mark its end. Rather it was a fiery punctuation mark, a coal-like comma, or salamander semicolon, in a continuing story. — Terry Pratchett

I will use a form of punctuation of my own, which will be something like this - when one is beginning he takes a long breath, for this use a capital. When he stops for breath, a comma, and when it is all gone, a period. Don't know the use of a semi-colon, but expect it is when one thinks he is out of breath and isn't. — Anne Ellis

Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop. — Victor Klemperer

i thought grief would insert itself in the middle and never leave.

i know better now.
stanzas are for quitters
punctuation is for the brave.
If love is a semicolon then grief is a comma:
it won't ever stand alone,
but it will give you one breath,
in. — Kat Helgeson

The stops point out, with truth, the time of pause
A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause.
t ev'ry comma, stop while one you count;
At semicolon, two is the amount;
A colon doth require the time of three;
The period four, as learned men agree. — Cecil B. Hartley

Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. — Lynne Truss

Choosing whether or not to insert a comma is the same as choosing whether or not to buy a house. — Chloe Thurlow

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.

Yeah, well, the F-bomb - it's become as ubiquitous as the word 'like.' People just throw the word 'like' around as punctuation. And I think in a lot of everyday speech, the F-bomb has become a kind of dash or a comma. — Geoffrey Rush