Top 145 Punctuation Quotes & Sayings

Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell.

Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.

Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.

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

Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection.

Accent and emphasis are the pith of reading; punctuation is but secondary.

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.

That's always been Guillermo's preference, is to have as much there practically as is humanly possible, and that digital graphic images are more a punctuation mark than they are a replacement.

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

Give a civil servant a good case and he'll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives, and convoluted apology.

If the semicolon is one of the neglected children in the family of punctuation marks these days, told to stay in its room and entertain itself, because mummy and daddy are busy, the apostrophe is the abused victim.

You could figure out at least 80 percent of the context and meaning of a text if people used punctuation, and we wouldn't have had to write our sketch.

Many writers profess great exactness in punctuation who never yet made a point.

They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff.

We are at a punctuation point in human history where the Industrial Age and institutions have finally come to their logical conclusion. They have essentially run out of gas.

Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.

I realized that my kisses with Dane had become a form of punctuation, the quotations or the hasty dash at the end of a conversation

Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation.

Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?

This morning arrives a letter from my ancient silver-mining comrade, Calvin H. Higbie, a man whom I have not seen nor had communication with for forty-four years. . . . [Footnote: Roughing It is dedicated to Higbie.] . . . I shall allow myself the privilege of copying his punctuation and his spelling, for to me they are a part of the man. He is as honest as the day is long. He is utterly simple-minded and straightforward, and his spelling and his punctuation are as simple and honest as he is himself. He makes no apology for them, and no apology is needed.

I need an irony punctuation mark for the clueless.

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.

I bet when all the punctuation marks have a party, they quietly look at exclamation point's wife and think, that poor woman.

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

I write in the most distressingly slow way in terms of punctuation and grammar.

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 reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

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

I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.

But still, it looked completely natural, as if we had been kissing at the ends of sentences for ages, while the rest of the world was still hung up on punctuation.

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

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

I might not use capital letters. But I would definitely use an apostrophe…and probably a period. I’m a huge fan of punctuation.

Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.

Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.

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.

Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools oyu have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin.

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.

Punctuation, is? fun!

Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

I still put punctuation in my texts. If it's an 'I', I make sure it's a capital.

The Biblical text does not have punctuation marks like periods and question marks. Where we end sentences is a matter of interpretation.

Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life.

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.

smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

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.

Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation.

Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers

The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.

Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.

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.