Exclamation Point Quotes

In other nightmares, in his everyday reality, Victor watched his father take a drink of vodka on a completely empty stomach. Victor could hear that near-poison fall, then hit, flesh and blood, nerve and vein. Maybe it was like lightning tearing an old tree into halves. Maybe it was like a wall of water, a reservation tsunami, crashing onto a small beach. Maybe it was like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Maybe it was like all that. Maybe. But after he drank, Victor's father would breathe in deep and close his eyes, stretch, and straighten his neck and back. During those long drinks, Victor's father wasn't shaped like a question mark. He looked more like an exclamation point. ~ Sherman Alexie

Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both. ~ Criss Jami

November 4, 1987 Chicago I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read I LOVE KILLING COMMUNISTS. The word love was replaced by a heart shape I'm guessing they'll put on the typewriter keyboard any day now, right beside the exclamation point. The bumper sticker was on a Ford Fairlane on Montrose Avenue. ~ David Sedaris

People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays; it's one exclamation point to another. ~ Tom Wolfe

If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the "form of funny," which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness. ~ Chuck Klosterman

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. Thats basic spelling that every woman ought to know. ~ Mistinguett

Rosethorn had gone to her room the moment Niko started to cough. Now she returned with her syrup and a firm look in her eye. "I thought you were having trouble last night. Drink this." She poured some into a cup and held it out to him.
Niko looked at it as if she offered him rotten fish. "I am fine. I am per-" He couldn't even finish the sentence for coughing.
"It's not bad," said Tris, crossing her fingers behind her back. "Really, tastes like-like mangoes."
Niko looked at her, then took the cup and downed its contents. The four watched with interest as his cheeks turned pale, then scarlet. "That's terrible (exclamation point)" he cried, his voice a thin squeak.
"Maybe I was thinking of some other syrup," Tris remarked with a straight face. ~ Tamora Pierce

I can't wait to play the Hammerstein shows. Things have been exploding in the last week, and that's going to be the exclamation point. ~ Trey Anastasio

Extroverts want us to have fun, because they assume we want what they want. And sometimes we do. But "fun" itself is a "bright" word, the kind of word that comes with flashing lights and an exclamation point! One of Merriam-Webster's definitions of "fun" is "violent or excited activity or argument." The very word makes me want to sit in a dimly lit room with lots of pillows - by myself. ~ Laurie A. Helgoe

Once she had thrown a square of birch bark into the fire when her father came in the door. He might then have asked her why her quill pen had shaped a row of straight and crooked question marks and after each one an exclamation point
in rows of ten, perhaps forty running along
?! ?! ?! ?!
arranged in pairs or couples. If he had asked her what is this folderol and what can this nonsense mean she would have said the same she said when shaping them with her pen, one pair, one couple after another. Each question mark stands for my ignorance and asks if I may learn and know the answer. And each exclamation point stands for my surprise at how little I know, my amazement at my vast ignorance, my utter astonishment at how much there is for me to learn. ~ Carl Sandburg

I like you, period."
"I like you, exclamation point. ~ Olivia Cunning

I will dance a little. I will move with the wind. I will give my body to my love and celebrate that we have substance beyond the idea of ourselves. We can move. We can touch. This is my physical exclamation point. This is how I can awaken my mind to the possibilities in the day. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality! ~ Lewis Thomas

The almost-always-ghastly exclamation point has been lately compared to canned laughter. ~ George F. Will

Never trust an exclamation point. ~ Linda Urban

He was not thinking of Maddie I-Live-To-Make-Your-Life-Miserable Freemont in terms of sexuality. He was not attracted to her in the least. Period and exclamation point. ~ Kelly Moran

I'm...um...I've got guests in my studio. I don't know how they undid my secure barricade made of cardboard signs that said KEEP OUT! and SECRET ROOM! in all caps with an exclamation point, but it's my program director, Lauren, and some man I've never seen bef - but no, I have seen him before. ~ Joseph Fink

God is not an exclamation point. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called "human grace." Somewhere along the way, we've lost sight of this. ~ Eric Weiner

I read once that this man was in the chair and when the electrocutioner threw the switch the smoke came out of the man's head and formed a question mark over him and everybody said it was an omen, that maybe he didn't commit the murder they killed him for."
"Well," I said, "if they catch me, there won't be any question mark. There'll be an exclamation point. ~ Elliott Chaze

Illumination

Always there is something more to know

what lingers at the edge of thought

awaiting illumination as in

this second-hand book full

of annotations daring the margins in pencil

a light stroke as if

the writer of these small replies

meant not to leave them forever

meant to erase

evidence of this private interaction

Here a passage underlined there

a single star on the page

as in a night sky cloud-swept and hazy

where only the brightest appears

a tiny spark I follow

its coded message try to read in it

the direction of the solitary mind

that thought to pencil in

a jagged arrow It

is a bolt of lightning

where it strikes

I read the line over and over

as if I might discern

the little fires set

the flames of an idea licking the page

how knowledge burns Beyond

the exclamation point

its thin agreement angle of surprise

there are questions the word why

So much is left
untold Between

the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl

between what is said and not

white space framing the story

the way the past unwritten

eludes us So much

is implication the ~ Natasha Trethewey

Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark. ~ Amos Oz

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The way you live your day is a sentence in the story of your life. Each day you make the choice whether the sentence ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. ~ Steve Maraboli

There are instances in which it might seem more appropriate or accurate to include an exclamation point with a question mark. This has given rise to a unique punctuation mark known as the "interrobang" ( ~ Farlex International

Changing the world, one exclamation point at a time. ~ Jon Glaser

I love to accent movement. The eye goes to where the white is - you know, the glove. And the feet, if you're dancing, you can put an exclamation point on your movement if it has a bit of light on it. So I wore the white socks. And for the design of the jacket, I would sit with the people who made the clothes and tell them where I wanted a button or a buckle or a design. ~ Michael Jackson

watch your tense and case

oh baby
i want to be your direct object.
you know, that is to say
i want to be on the other
side of all the verbs i know
you know how to use.

i've seen you conjugate:
i touch
you touched
you heard
she knows
who cares

i'm interested in
a few decent prepositions:
above, over, inside, atop,
below, around and
i'm sure there are more
right on the tip of
your tongue.

i am ready to spend
the present perfect
splitting your infinitive
there's an art to the way you
dangle your participle and

since we're being informal it's okay to
use a few contractions, like
wasn't (going to)
shouldn't (have)
and a conjunction:
but (did it anyway)

and i'm really really glad
you're not into dependent
clauses since all i'm really
interested in is your
bad, bad grammar
and your exclamation point. ~ Daphne Gottlieb

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. ~ Chuck Klosterman

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke. ~ Mark Twain

Huzzah." Free met his gaze with a flat stare. "Crime! Right now that crime is blackmail, but it won't be blackmail much longer."
"No? How do you figure?"
"With luck and a good amount of arsenic ... ?" She gave him a smile of her own. "Soon it will be: 'Huzzah! Murder!' Now there's a cause that deserves my exclamation point. ~ Courtney Milan

(On Panic Attacks) And once I had my first one with Maegan, they crept up about once a month. And without warning. It was worse than getting my period. In fact, I called it my exclamation point. ~ Mamrie Hart

Note: When reading dry political theory, such as the texts you will find on the following pages, it may be useful to apply the Exclamation Point Test from time to time, to determine if the material you are reading is actually relevant to your life. To apply this test, simply go through the text replacing all the punctuation marks at the ends of the sentences with exclamation points. If the results sound absurd when read aloud, then you know you're wasting your time. ~ CrimethInc.

it s cheerio
my deario
that pulls a
lady through
exclamation point ~ Don Marquis

When you see the veins popping out of my neck, that's an exclamation point. ~ Chelsea Handler

There is no point in speaking to people who have either no faith or refuse to develop it through their own experience. ~ Chandrasekharendra Saraswati

For 'A.D.,' when I got the script, I was really moved, because even though it told a story that I knew all my life, it was told in a different way. It was told from a very personal point of view. ~ Juan Pablo Di Pace

Like most trends, at the beginning it's driven by fundamentals, at some point speculation takes over. What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end. ~ Warren Buffett

The name is somewhat familiar, but I can't recall a face to go with it."
Obviously disappointed in her reaction, her uncle said irritably, "You apparently have a poor memory. If you can't recall a knight or an earl," he added sarcastically, "I doubt you'll remember a mere mister."
Stung by his unprovoked remark, she said stiffly, "Who is the third?"
"Mr. Ian Thornton. He's-"
That name sent Elizabeth jolting to her feet while a blaze of animosity and a sock of terror erupted through her entire body. "Ian Thornton!" she cried, leaning her palms on the desk to steady herself. "Ian Thornton!" she repeated, her voice rising with a mixture of anger and hysterical laughter. "Uncle, if Ian Thornton discussed marrying me, it was at the point of Robert's gun! His interest in me was never marriage, and Robert dueled with him over his behavior. In fact, Robert shot him!"
Instead of relenting or being upset, her uncle merely regarded her with blank indifference, and Elizabeth said fiercely, "Don't you understand?"
"What I understand," he said, glowering, "is that he replied to my message in the affirmative and was very cordial. Perhaps he regrets his earlier behavior and wishes to make amends."
"Amends!" she cried. "I've no idea whether he feels loathing for me or merely contempt, but I can assure you he does not and has never wished to wed me! He's the reason I can't show my face in society!"
"In my opinion, you're better off away from that decaden ~ Judith McNaught

Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heav'n bestows on thee. ~ Alexander Pope

It strikes me that although we occasionally carp about Having To Suffer, and moan about never producing real Art, and become despondent or try too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our usual trick of synthesizing something to worry about, and should really be thanking ourselves that we live the life we do. We may think ourselves parasites, complain about Mind-generated tales, and long for 'genuine' feelings, 'real' emotion, but we are missing the point, and indeed making a work of art ourselves in imagining such an uncomplicated existence is even possible. We have the best of it. ~ Iain M. Banks

What I am anxious to do is to secure my legislation ... What I want to do is to get through that, and if I can point to a record of usefulness of that kind, I am entirely willing to quit office. ~ William Howard Taft

Let me be frank. I find you intriguing, and extremely appealing, and delightful company, and very much a man who deserves more pleasure in his life. If you'd like to take that pleasure with me, I'd be honoured. If you aren't so minded, don't take offence at the offer, and I shan't at the refusal. And if you decide you'd prefer Corvin, for example, I shall bow out like a gentleman, although I shall probably kick him in the shins at some point from pure envy. ~ K.J. Charles

Certain periods in history suddenly lift humanity to an observation point where a clear light falls upon a world previously dark. ~ Anne Sullivan

I think of Ariel, my local neighborhood mermaid, how she only had twenty-four hours to turn her life around ... ~ Shannon Celebi

The risings and settings of the sun, the moon, and the other heavenly bodies may come about from the lighting up and quenching of their fires ... ; for nothing in our sensory experience runs counter to this hypothesis. Or the said effects may be caused by the emergence of these bodies from a point above the earth and again by the earth's position in front of them; for nothing in our sensory experience is against this.45 Here two alternative explanations of "risings and settings" are offered; both are of equal value and equally true, since neither is contradicted by anything in our experience. On the contrary, we have all seen fires die down from lack of fuel, and lights obscured or blacked out by objects coming in front of them. ~ Epicurus

I wore white kabuki makeup, had blue-black hair. At one point, I shaved an inch and a half around my hairline and continued the white makeup up so it made my head look slightly deformed. I thought it was hilarious. ~ Melissa McCarthy

I found myself surrounded by really old veterans wearing hats that said, "Retired Marine - SEMPER FI." These hats didn't appear to fit on their heads, but instead seemed to hover over them.
At one point, I mistakenly tried to take the last box of crackers that a veteran also wanted. He started yelling, "I ran away from home at seventeen, lied about my age, and joined the Corps! I fought in World War II, Korea, and NAM! I have no cartilage in my right knee! It's bone-on-bone, but every morning I run six miles! I did not sacrifice my knee for this country to come here today and have you disrespect me at the commissary. Oooh-RAH!"
I dropped the crackers and walked away. ~ Mollie Gross

I am weary of this notion of faithfulness to a point of view at all cost. Life around us is ever changing, and I believe that one should try to change one's slant accordingly - at least once every ten years. The great heroic devotion to one point of view is very alien to me - it's a lack of humility. Mayakovsky killed himself because his pride would not be reconciled with something new happening within himself - or around him. ~ Boris Pasternak

Dismally enough, some of us are insecure in such a way that we cannot bear the thought of the sovereignty of God, the thought of His Being as greater than ourselves; it moves us into feelings of insignificance. Nonetheless, allow me to personally and peacefully maintain that if I were to worship and obey anything, I would like it far greater than myself or any person or human system, preferably to a point where it, in all its majesty, makes me feel lost and even 'creatural' in my basic humanity. Only this God - He who is great beyond human measure, yet still considers His creation precious - I find to be more than worthy of praise; otherwise, I bow down and worship nothing. And if the thought of such a superior and almighty God were to indeed offend me, I would have to remember that it is because I am only as significant as the things which I am idolizing, things which are ultimately separating me, the creation, from my ultimate Creator. ~ Criss Jami

This is my friend Durandarte, flower and mirror of the true lovers and valiant knights of his time. He is held enchanted here, as I myself and many others are, by that French enchanter Merlin, who, they say, was the devil's son; but my belief is, not that he was the devil's son, but that he knew, as the saying is, a point more than the devil. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism
ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power ... Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

The other side of mental blanketing - the buffing and puffing up of marriage to keep it seeming shiny and magical - is up against a formidable fact. Statistically speaking, the act of marrying is banal. Even though many Americans wait longer than ever to marry, and often do not stay long in the marriages they do enter, most Americans - close to 90 percent - still do marry at some point in their lives. Some try it over and over again. Marrying, then, does not make people special; it makes them conventional. ~ Bella DePaulo

I suppose I hadn't believed in Fate until that point. But it's hard not to [...] when you think that there was no way, across miles, continents, vast ocean, we were meant to see each other again. ~ Jojo Moyes

The point is that his genuine aim, the unconscious aim concealed behind all his conscious activities, remains the same: to use his power to blot out the humiliations inflicted on him in childhood and denied by him ever since. But this aim can never be achieved. The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it, as long as one denies the suffering it involved. Accordingly, a dictator's efforts to achieve that aim are doomed to failure. Compulsive repetition will always reassert itself. And an endless succession of victims is forced to pay the price. With ~ Alice Miller

I always wanted to kind of make the listener feel like it was them that I was talking about, or to the point that I could say the rhyme, and feel like it's them saying it. ~ Rakim

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That's why I love coffee shops and public places - I mean, they're all out there. ~ David Lynch

Footsteps in the snow suggest where you have been, point to where you were going: but when they suddenly vanish, never dismiss the possibility of flight ... ~ Diane Duane

Amd I am not blind to the fact that I have been given gifts you never had. Living a godly life was expected on me, and it was an easy path for me to follow. No one ever had such expectations of you. For you to embrace the Lord at this point in your life would be nothing short of heroic, Alex. It would take an act of such strength and courage that it would be humbling for all who have ever know you. You can begin building a life of valor today. ~ Elizabeth Camden

Grownups, as a rule, should always be ready to pay for their own meals - or else ready to graciously accept their date's insistence on paying. The point is, one doesn't sit there batting one's eyelashes, fully expecting someone else to claim the bill. ~ Lynn Coady

I'm playing against men who are bigger and stronger than I'm used to. I've definitely got to bulk up at some point. ~ Patrick Kane

There was little point in mourning a thing you'd never had, and so she didn't mourn, most days. ~ Cecilia Grant

This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute ... This point of election ... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties. ~ Anthony Burgess

But I had come to where I had never been before, the blessed point of sufficient desperation. ~ Iris Murdoch

I made a point of always teaching undergraduates because they are not a captive audience ... I always tried out my research ideas first in the classroom to get feedback from people who didn't have to listen to me if I didn't make it interesting. ~ Edmund Morgan

In a way I feel I have been vindicated because I hadn't done anything wrong. The Review Committee gave me a patient hearing and I put my point of view across to them. ~ Sourav Ganguly

People like to think the worst. They like to have hushed gossip sessions and point their fingers at someone's problems that are more obvious than their own. ~ Marcia Lynn McClure

At a certain point, we saw the police cracking down on the Occupy Wall Street activists. I won't call the actions of police appropriate or inappropriate. ~ Vladimir Putin

We all reach a point as young adults when we wonder what we should be doing with our lives - or, at the very least, which direction to point ourselves in. Beyond the means to get by, we need to think about what's most important to us. Not surprisingly, I discovered that for me the answer was family. ~ Saroo Brierley

Christian magazine Sojourners, likes to point out that the Bible contains more than three thousand references to alleviating poverty - enough reason, he thinks, for making this a central moral issue for Christians. ~ Peter Singer

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable. ~ Errol Morris

We're your friends. Our job is to tease you mercilessly about your foibles, rag you about your upright, honorable nature, and point out to you when you're being a complete dolt. ~ Laura Lee Guhrke

I am convinced that all our attempts to change the letter of the law and to reeducate people have been, and are, merely band-aid solutions for a fatal hemorrhage. The system will never change because our starting point is flawed. The secular view of man can neither give the grandeur that God alone can give, nor can it see the evil within the human heart that God alone can reveal and cure, for atheism implicitly denudes each individual of the grand image God has imprinted upon His creation. ~ Ravi Zacharias

In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade - which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to 'How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?' is 'Go fuck yourself,' because you can't directly relate any of those quantities. ~ Josh Bazell

As for sticking strictly to presently known science, I will simply point out that we have already experienced at least two major revolutions in science in this century alone. ~ Stanley Schmidt

Even the things that showed him his path seemed to point at what a fool he was. Another of life's ironies? Or just fate's way of mocking him? ~ Ruth Frances Long

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a
beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start
with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars'
unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time
is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been
understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears
that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science,
too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into
billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off
in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true
beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is
but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story
sets out. ~ George Eliot

Think of yourself as a brand. You need to be remembered. What will they remember you for? What defines you? If you have it in you, do something that defines you. Invent something, develop a unique skill, get noticed for something - it creates a talking point. ~ Chris Arnold

I observed an eighteen-year-old friend of one of our daughters talking to his mother on the telephone. As he hung up the phone in frustration he said, "She makes me so angry, she's always telling me what to think and where to go and how to do things." He was obviously upset and filled with anger. I told him he had one of two choices. He could either continue to practice being right, or practice being kind. If you insist on being right you will argue, get frustrated, angry, and your problem will persist with your mom, I explained. If you simply practice being kind, you can remind yourself that this is your mom, she's always been that way, she will very likely stay that way, but you are going to send her love instead of anger when she starts in with her routine. A simple statement of kindness such as, "That's a good point, Mom, I'll think about it," and you have a spiritual solution to your problem. ~ Wayne W. Dyer

I am liking him enough to know that a different time and a different place might have led to a different outcome. But since I'm not planning on leaving this time or place anytime soon, it's not a point worth making. ~ David Levithan

A further point is that, little by little, in the current universe, everything is slowly being named; nor does this have anything to do with the older Aristotelian universals in which the idea of a chair subsumes all its individual manifestations. ~ Fredric Jameson