Ampersand Quotes

Me & Mik. I've never been part of an ampersand before.

They had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands; the air was heav'y with th'em&.

Sometimes I feel like an ampersand. I wake up waiting for the crush. Maybe the body is the only question an answer can’t extinguish. How many kisses have we crushed to our lips in prayer—only to pick up the pieces?

The plus sign is a hipster ampersand.

Privilege is driving a smooth road and not even knowing it.

THE WONDERS OF PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING                1    ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY ABOUT THE COMMA!                2    I BEFORE E COMPLETELY SORTED OUT!                3    THE MYSTERY OF THE SEMICOLON REVEALED!!!                4    SEE THE AMPERSAND! (SMALL EXTRA CHARGE)                5    FUN WITH BRACKETS! ** WILL ACCEPT VEGETABLES, EGGS, AND CLEAN USED CLOTHING

Every night, just before you fall asleep, other voices start talking amongst themselves in the monochrome waters at the deep end of your brain…

The symbol “&” was a logogram—literally a picture representing a word. While many people assumed the symbol derived from the English word “and,” it actually derived from the Latin word et. The ampersand’s unusual design “&” was a typographical fusion of the letters E and T—the ligature still visible today in computer fonts like Trebuchet, whose ampersand “” clearly echoed its Latin origin.

Ragged curls of unfurling ampersands swam across her vision.

a nine, an ampersand, one of those weird O’s with a line through it that the Swedish like so much.

The origin of the ampersand was always one of the first things Langdon taught his symbology classes. The symbol “&” was a logogram—literally a picture representing a word. While many people assumed the symbol derived from the English word “and,” it actually derived from the Latin word et. The ampersand’s unusual design “&” was a typographical fusion of the letters E and T—the ligature still visible today in computer fonts like Trebuchet, whose ampersand “” clearly echoed its Latin origin.

As passion’s object, dig with your ampersand: be cold & hot. The receptive earth will come to transform the root-end that your planting hand cut & abandoned, to new chrysanthemum. Heartfelt thought, drop your guard, keep clear, be slow; double your careful opposites & grow.

You’re not certain, but you suspect that most other people’s evenings are not ending in tears. Outside the window, iced branches click emptily in the wind…

Long, intense silences follow, which you endure by staring out the window at a lawn so deeply green it looks botanically assassinated…

I wrote the bulk of this story while in Chicago, working out of various co-working offices; my favorite space was Ampersand in Logan Square. And a few of the ideas in this story were born after a night at The Burke’s Web Pub in Bucktown—what a fabulous place full of fabulous people. Thanks to those places for the creative spaces they provide; and a special thank you to Parliament Co-working.

designer can inject the most artistic flair. The word “ampersand” didn’t come into being until the nineteenth century. At that time & was customarily taught as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and pronounced “and.” When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words “and, per se [i.e., by itself ], ‘and.’” This eventually became corrupted to “ampersand.” The symbol is a favorite of law and

The hipster contingent has taken over a lot of the commercial streets, and now you can't go two blocks without running into some up-its-own-ass artisanal shop with a name that's just two random nouns thrown together with an ampersand. Satchel & Dove. Twig & Petal. Those are the places where you find out there's such a thing as boutique tarragon mayonnaise and that a baby onesie can legitimately cost sixty dollars. (p.169)

The melacholy and the tenderness of mortal life; the passion and the pain; The claret tailight of that dwindling plane Off Hesperus; your gesture dismay On running out of cigarettes; the way You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime Snails leave or flagstone; this good ink, this rhyme. This index card, this slender rubber band Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand, Are found in Heaven by the newlydead Stored in its strongholds through the years.

Yet despite its current usage, the @ is not a product of the digital age, and may be almost as old as the ampersand. It had been associated with trade for many centuries, known as an *amphora* or jar, a unit of measurement. Most countries have their own term for it, often linked to food (in Hebrew it is *shtrudl*, meaning strudel, in Czech it is *zavinac* or rollmop herring) or to cute animals (*Affenschwanz* or monkey's tail in German, *snabel-a* meaning "the letter a, with a trunk," in Danish, *sobaka* or dog in Russian,), or both (*escargot* in French).

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules: (1) Avoid alliteration. Always (2) Prepositions are not words to end sentences with. (3) Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.) (4) Employ the vernacular. (5) Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc. (6) Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary. (7) It is wrong to ever split an infinitive. (8) Contractions aren't necessary. (9) Foreign words and phrases are not apropos. (10) One should never generalize. (11) Eliminate quotations. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." (12) Comparisons are as bad as clichés. (13) Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous. (14) Profanity sucks. (15) Be more or less specific. (16) Understatement is always best. (17) Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement. (18) One-word sentences? Eliminate. (19) Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake. (20) The passive voice is to be avoided. (21) Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms. (22) Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed. (23) Who needs rhetorical questions?

In North Pittman is a particularly striking theology. There, one church memorably teaches that if all the trains were to be still, together, for one moment, if there were no rails percussing the iron road, all human life would wink instantly out. Because such noises are the snoring, the sleep-breathing of a railsea world, & it is the rails that dream us. We do not dream the rails.

Endangered Species Even this brief thought is endless. A man speaks as if unaware of the erotic life of the ampersand. In the isolate field he comes to count one by one the rare butterflies as they die. He says witness is to say what you mean as if you mean it. So many of them are the color of the leaves they feed on, he calls sympathy a fact, a word by which he means to make a claim about grace. I have in my life said many things I did not exactly mean. Walk graceless through the field. Graceless so the insects leap up into the blank page where the margins fill with numbers that speak diminishment. Absence as it nears also offers astonishment. Absence riddles even this briefest thought, here is your introduction to desire, time's underneath where the roots root down into nothing like loose threads hanging from the weaving's underside. No one seeing the roots can guess at the field above. Green equation that ends in yellow occasions. Theory is insubstantial. The eye latches on to the butterflies as they fly and the quick heart follows, not a root in nothing but a thread across abstraction. They fly away. What in us follows we do not name. What the butterflies pull out us as in battle horses pull chariot, we do not name. But there is none, no battle, no surge, no retreat, a field full not of danger, but the endangered, where dust-wings pull from us what we thought we lost, what theory denies, where in us ideas go to die, and thought with the quaking grass quakes. Some call it breath but I'm still breathing. So empty I know I'm not any emptier. On slim threads they pull it out me, disperse-no one takes notes-disappear, &

When you finally answer his calls, & he asks what you’ve been doing, you reply, Thinking about the Sumerians, because you don’t want to seem lazy…

These are latter days. You regard the writ of frost on the window pane as a blueprint for something yet to come. Something severe & detailed…

Your sheets are stark parchment, lit by a burning telegram that gives off the incense of human hair…

The low, afternoon light solders the sliding glass door into a slab of gold circuitry you step through...

Your hair freezes, making you shiver presciently like the wise child in the Brothers Grimm…

I’d like to walk again in her weather, in the dark through the fog, / its gray damage // laid down all over town…

The art of staying alive when the story darkens with the dusk of plot means being too much of a bother…

ampersand.

He patted te large book that was the Prose Portl and looked at Mycroft’s genetically engineered bookworms. They were on rest & recuperation at present in their goldfish bowl; they had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands

Perhaps it was my tiredness talking, but didn’t people caught out in their intimate apparel have some kind of obligation to be wearing something silly or embarrassing? Hearts or rubber duck print, or perhaps a giant smiley face? Alas, no such luck.

Agatha says that, nowadays, things that people have just written can be almost as valuable as pictures they've painted.

No. Anything but Ampersand. Piano has to go too.” He was not writing any reports about the mighty fighting ship Ampersand.

Overboard?" Ampersand said. "But we're not at sea." Teddy scratched at his beard. "That's what they all say," he said. "Right before we throw them overboard.

Telling the story of an important, sympathetic public figure is often difficult for the biographer at the inevitable turning point: the ampersand between rise and fall. The greatest successes are in the pages at the left. The pages on the right may be strewn with mishaps, unfinished projects, marital problems, sadness, illness, and end notes. Even when those pages also offer modest joys and major triumphs, as they did for Debussy, the reader knows how the story ends.

I don’t lie, Kaya. The day I cannot be honest with you, I’ll be silent.

I'm a woman so obviously I should have known to behave better, isn't it? I should be open, but not too open. I should be modest, but not boring. I should be friendly, but within limits. The set of rules that apply to me don’t apply to you, do they?

It’s called an ampersand. It also means union. Or going on a journey. Or”—I’d written this down because I liked it so much but knew I’d never remember it exactly. I read it out—“an expectation for something more to occur.

When did wearing shoes start feeling so intimate?

Do not judge me for finding fictional men more satisfying than real ones,

He was her captive, and she held the keys to his freedom. No, he corrected himself. She was his freedom.