In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy and the semicolon quietly practices the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.
Lynne Truss
My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
Ernest Hemingway
A period is a stop sign. A semicolon is a rolling stop sign; a comma is merely an amber light.
Andrew Offutt
Used sparingly, the semicolon emphasizes your crucial contrasts; used recklessly, it merely clutters your page.
Sheridan Baker
Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
Lewis Thomas
The semicolon is an ugly bastard, and thus I tend to avoid it. Its utility in patching together two closely related sentences is to be admired, but patches like that should be a make-do solution, to be used when nothing better comes to mind.
Bill Walsh
No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
Isaac Babel
Punctuation herds words together, keeps others apart. Punctuation directs you how to read, in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play.
Lynne Truss
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation. Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.
Robert Frost
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment, and education. Sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.
E.B. White
