Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Commas. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Commas Quotes And Sayings by 86 Authors including Muriel Rukeyser,Lynne Truss,Gustave Flaubert,Mary Norris,Gracie Allen for you to enjoy and share.
Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge ...
Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.
Never place a period where God's placed a comma.
Never place a period where God has placed a comma.
It's always nice to end your sentences with an exclamation mark, and not a comma.
To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph-mere stops.
Anxiety takes away all the commas and full stops we need to make sense of ourselves.
It is my destiny to know people who abuse punctuation.
The American punctuation rule sticks in the craw of every computer scientist, logician, and linguist, because any ordering of typographical delimiters that fails to reflect the logical nesting of the content makes a shambles of their work.
On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.
I thought it was going to be different;
It turned out to be(,) just the same.
Many people live in an induced spiritual comma; they are inherently vicious, and are completely unaware of their malady.
Punctuation was, it is sad to say, invented a very long time ago. Even more frustrating, it has remained with us ever since.
They lay together like a word and a comma, asleep within an unfinished sentence.
Seems indecisive, doesn't it? Either be a period or be a comma, but make up your mind.
Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there's gonna come a time that you're gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
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.
There is always a comma to check whether are we going to do the same mistake which we have done before? But proble is that we never use this comma.
There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.
I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.
I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.
A text message has no soul, no matter how many commas you shift.
With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author's soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work.
Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.
I can't help but think that the way we punctuate now is the right way - that we are living in a punctuation renaissance.
No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.
We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.
In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.
Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.
I have put [the word] "discoveries" in inverted commas because scientific results, perhaps as much at least as artistic achievements, are a product of contemporary taste, driven by momentary appetites rather than eternal verities.
Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas
a whole grammar made of light, for words to hard to speak.
A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than the screams of the dying.
Balthazar was the kind of guy who used totally correct spelling and punctuation even when he was texting, which was sort of bizarrely hot. She was in serious trouble if commas could get her going.
Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.
I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.
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.
Punctuation is a fabulous tool for controlling your reader - you even get to control where they breathe. That's what I call power!
Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.
Me to Comma: I will never get use to you wanting to butt your way into my sentences
even if you're right.
If I wouldn't of spent so much time shooting spit wads at my English teacher I'd know how to punctuate good thing I normally write poetry.
Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.
Give me the comma of imperfect striving, thus to find zest in the immediate living. Ever the reaching but never the gaining, ever the climbing but never the attaining of the mountain top.
And I want to say anything is possible. Comma. You know.Comma-- Frank Bruno
Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss.
I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.
Semicolon, you dolt!
What's the difference between a cat and a comma?
One has claws at the end of its paws, and one is a pause at the end of a clause.
Great. They fucked with my punctuation?" "Pam says you're overly fond of semicolons.
No one knows what they are anymore," he says. "If you're not in the habit of reading nineteenth-century novels, you think that the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma - semicolons have become nothing but a distraction.
Someone has said that death is not a period, but a comma in the story of life.
Punctuation is over rated a fly on the page of the book can change it all to hell.
I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
How hideous is the semicolon.
All that remains is for a few dots and commas to be crossed.
From the reader's point of view, punctuation provides a map for one who must otherwise drive blindly past the by-ways, intersections, and detours of a writer's thought.
Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.
If I had my life over again[, ] I'd have thought more about words. And thought about them earlier.
I'm no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation.
Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.
She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.
Punctuation has its own philosophy, just as style does, although not as language does. Style is a good understanding of language, punctuation is a good understanding of style.
But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.
And finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which "German philosophy"
I hope you understand its right to inverted commas-
Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.
I need an irony punctuation mark for the clueless.
Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.
The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark ... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.
Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.
Punctuation is the art of dividing a written composition into sentences, or parts of sentences, by points or stops, for the purpose of marking the different pauses which the sense, and an accurate pronunciation require.
Wow," said Fishy. "I don't think I heard a single full stop in there. You know, when you start talking entirely in comma splices, you're probably ready for a time-out and a tranquilizer.
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.
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.
You expect death to bring some new form of punctuation, but there it is: one small gasp. Period.
I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let's say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!
I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.
Many writers profess great exactness in punctuation who never yet made a point.
A good procrastination should feel like you're inserting lots and lots of commas into the sentence of your life.
Well, I am more partial to a semicolon myself.
In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.
Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after "semicolons," and another one after "now." And
Write the book the way it should be written, then give it to somebody to put in the commas and shit.
Spelling and punctuation are completely irrelevant; unless you are hoping to be understood.
In my life, water has had the character of punctuation.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.
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.
Well, for one thing," she said, "her knowledge of punctuation begins and ends with her own beauty mark.
The semicolon is a much neglected beast
I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.
I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.
Punctuation is to words as cartilage is to bone, permitting articulation and bearing stress.
He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man's child sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.
Yes! Practice-singular!' the wise men screamed in unison. Three index fingers, like punctuation marks, jumped to attention in the air to emphasize their point (Life of Pi 68).
In Gospel grammar, death is not an exclamation point, merely a comma.
With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semicolin; it's a useful little chap
The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.