Semicolons Quotes

Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it. ~ Richard Hugo

I remember the rule for semicolons; the sentences on both sides have to be full ones. ~ Hugh Howey

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. ~ Margaret Fuller

Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index. ~ Jasper Fforde

Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, UP like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots ... you stop. But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes - that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity - well, they are the colons and semicolons. ~ Lynne Truss

Looking at the sky, he suddenly saw that it had become black. Then white again, but with great rippling circles. The circles were vultures wheeling around the sun. The vultures disappeared, to be replaced by checkers squares ready to be played on. On the board, the pieces moved around incredibly rapidly, winning dozens of games every minute. They were scarcely lined up before they started rushing at each other again, banging into each other, forming fighting combinations, wiping the other side out in the wink of an eye. Then the squares scattered, giving way to the grille of a crossword puzzle, and here, too, words flashed, drove each other away, clustered, were erased. They were all very long words, like Catalepsy, Thunderbird, Superrequeteriquísímo and Anticonstitutionally. The grille faded away, and suddenly the whole sky was covered with linked words, long sentences full of semicolons and inverted commas. For the space of a few seconds, there was this gigantic sheet of paper on which were written sentences that moved forward jerkily, changing their meaning, modifying their construction, altering completely as they advanced. It was beautiful, so beautiful that nothing like that had ever been read anywhere, and yet it was impossible to decipher the writing. It was all about death, or pity, or the incredible secrets that are hidden somewhere, at one of the farthest points of time. It was about water, too, about vast lakes floating just above the mountains, lakes shimmering u ~ J M G Le Clezio

You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Pretentious and over-active semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought. ~ Lynne Truss

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. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Great. They fucked with my punctuation?" "Pam says you're overly fond of semicolons. ~ M. Pierce

I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation – but for many it may be too late. ~ Lynne Truss

Semicolons ... signal, rather than shout, a relationship ... A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do." ~ George Will

Multiple times he has tried writing his thoughts about Marianne down on paper in an effort to make sense of them. He's moved by a desire to describe in words exactly how she looks and speaks. Her hair and clothing. The copy of Swann's Way she reads at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, with a dark French painting on the cover and a mint-coloured spine. Her long fingers turning the pages. She's not leading the same kind of life as other people. She acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then she can be so naive. He wants to understand how her mind works... He writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review. ~ Sally Rooney

When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of the curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. ~ Nicole Krauss

Introns are not the exception in human genes; they are the rule. Human introns are often enormous-spanning several hundreds of thousands of bases of DNA. And genes themselves are separated from each other by long stretches of intervening DNA, called intergenic DNA. Intergenic DNA and introns-spaces between genes and stuffers within genes-are though to have sequences that allow genes to be regulated in context. To return to our analogy; these regions might be described as long ellipses scattered with occasional punctuation marks. The human genome can thus be visualized as:

This......is............the......(...)...s...truc...ture......of......your......gen...om...e;

The words represent genes. The long ellipses between the words represent the stretches of intergenic DNA. The shorter ellipses within the words (gen...ome...e) are introns. The parentheses and semicolons-punctuation marks-are regions of DNA that regulate genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

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. ~ John Irving

If colons and semicolons give themselves airs and graces, at least they also confer airs and graces that the language would be lost without. ~ Lynne Truss