71 Quotes About Punctuation

Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.

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.

I can’t help but think that the way we punctuate now is the right way—that we are living in a punctuation renaissance.

Choosing whether or not to insert a comma is the same as choosing whether or not to buy a house.

You expect death to bring some new form of punctuation, but there it is: one small gasp. Period.

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

Something there is in cyberspace that doesn't love an apostrophe.

Melville has his tics, but he always put his words in the right order. Once you fall under the spell of the writer, you look past those ticks because you are more interested in what the writer says than judging how well he grasped the editorial conventions of his time.