Punctuation Within Quotes & Sayings

Punctuation is a fabulous tool for controlling your reader - you even get to control where they breathe. That's what I call power! — Nicola Morgan

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard. — Russell Baker

So, have you seen Flood?" she asked. "Cop?" She added "cop" with a high pop on the p, like it was a punctuation mark, not a profession — Christopher Moore

They have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight (author's punctuation) — John Dos Passos

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Well, for one thing," she said, "her knowledge of punctuation begins and ends with her own beauty mark. — Melissa Bank

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

To take so much punctuation in one hit initially sounds audacious, but perhaps the thief thought no one would notice as most readers never get that far into Ulysses - you will recall the theft of chapter sixty-two from Moby-Dick, where no one noticed? — Jasper Fforde

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason
if the worlds are in any way blurred
the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'. — Raymond Carver

Part of one's despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else
yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to "get a life" by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves. Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions. Being burned as a witch is not safely enough off the agenda. — Lynne Truss

It's difficult to root for America when the villains of the story live in a ditch and are armed with jagged rocks. At some point in recent years they looked up from their international heroism to realize they'd alienated the entire world. — Yahtzee Croshaw

There may be a lot of things I'm not good at, thought Vimes, but at least I don't treat the punctuation of a sentence like a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey ... — Terry Pratchett

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements. — Ernest Hemingway,

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation — Robert Frost

I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation. — Brian P. Cleary

I don't think music affects what words I choose to type in what order, within what punctuation, at this point, because I'm rereading and editing each sentence, at this point, in my published books, probably 100-150 times each, on average, and listening to probably 20-60 different songs in that time. — Tao Lin

How deaf and stupid I have been, he thought, walking on quickly. When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion. I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened. — Hermann Hesse

Punctuation, is? fun! — Daniel Keyes

Punctuation is over rated a fly on the page of the book can change it all to hell. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

I gave her a love letter and she returned it back to me by correcting spelling and punctuation. — M.F. Moonzajer

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs. — Richard Brautigan

In the minds of some people, writing is one thing, but thinking is quite another. If they define writing as spelling, the production of sentences with random meanings, and punctuation, then they might have a case. But who would accept such a definition? Writing is the production of meaning. Writing is thinking. — George Hillocks Jr.

And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech. — Julian Jaynes

Oh, dear." Free looked down, fluttering her eyelashes demurely. "Is my punctuation showing once more? — Courtney Milan

You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within. — Robert J. Randisi

There's a new spell you get around level 50 called "Mirror Image" which might as well be called "Reap On, Ye Fucking Reaper Man". — Yahtzee Croshaw

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

Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration. — Tom Bissell

Rilke had a line...something about fishes. Or was that by someone else? Too much had already been written, too many pages, too many words. Maybe writers would be better to just stop, himself included, so that people could catch up. Maybe one day they'd reach a limit. No more books would be able to fit into the universe's bookshelves, not another paragraph squeezed in, not even a punctuation mark. Writers would have to find something else to do. It might be the best thing. — Eric Gabriel Lehman

Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers — Kurt Vonnegut

To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation. — Lynne Truss

Sometimes a face could be so simple: even a couple of dark spots on a lighter surface or a dark oval in the distance might be a face. An electrical socket could be a face, a mailbox or a couple of punctuation marks could congeal suddenly into something with an expression. Our faces, on the other hand, were made of hundreds of different parts, each part separate and tenuous and capable of being ugly, each part waiting for a product designed to isolate and act upon it. — Alexandra Kleeman

Use correct grammar and punctuation. Do not use net speak, like WOT, W-O-T or U. Those messages get a lot lower reply rate. — Christian Rudder

This is about as simple as games get. There isn't even the paltriest context for what you're doing; you're not exacting revenge on limbless pigs or feeding your pet bitch-lizard. You're a ninja, fruit is flying up in front of you, and fuck fruit. Sitting around all smug on trees and in pies. — Yahtzee Croshaw