Asterisk Quotes

I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks.

Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

Well when I write my book, and tell the tale of my adventures--all these little stars that shake out of my cloak-- I must save those to use for asterisks!

Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment.

If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.

Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird singing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.

Numbersign questionmark you" and "Asterisk exclamation point the world.

Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.

Well — when I write my book, and tell the tale Of my adventures — all these little stars That shake out of my cloak — I must save those To use for asterisks...

The dedication of passwords was the new fellowship of marriage. To each other, couples had become furtive asterisks

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world. The fact is, the real experience can't be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words. The people who have been there, in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and others won't. But once having been there, there's a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of the shoulders, and it's not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or wrong, but simply knowing it is there, always. It's a question of bowing to it, so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: All right, I know you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don't we? And perhaps the condition of your existing at all is precisely that we preserve the forms, create the patterns - have you thought of that?

Look, the world is everywhere: satellites, end tables, the pink and white poinsettias outside the church; reunions and degrees. All those radiant asterisks . . . Soon it will all make sense.

I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks.

That night, side by side, we drifted among the galaxies of sea-stars, while far, far above us the asterisks of light marked out the footnotes on the page of eternity.

That guy,” Lindsey said, “is a douche. Asterisk, I hate him. Footnote, he can suck it.

There are no asterisks here. Your feelings are completely valid, you are under no obligation to pardon me, I have yet to earn it for putting you through fear.   What I am trying to say is, I know now that becoming kind is worth every single exhausting effort and sometimes it takes a thousand years.   Today, I apologised to someone I owe an ocean full of amends to.

You and I We do not talk anymore And all our asterisks Are turning Into flowers.

I hate reading poems—school made me hate them. I’d spend hours interpreting one, just to read the memorandum and realize I’d be fucked during exams. I remember making a little asterisk next to every question I struggled with, and at the end of the paper, I’d realize I was looking at the fucking Milky Way.

The flakes stuck in my eyelashes. They fell on my sleeves. Huge. Flowers and stars. They fell onto each other, held their shapes, became small piles of perfect asterisks and blooms tumbled together in their discrete geometries like children’s blocks.

Frank's bio prompts us to to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have either to make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization flourish or some shit...Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.

I will wake you up early even though I know you like to stay through the credits. I will leave pennies in your pockets, postage stamps of superheroes in between the pages of your books, sugar packets on your kitchen counter. I will Hansel and Gretel you home. I talk through movies. Even ones I have never seen before. I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks. There will be more sweat than you are used to. More skin. More words than are necessary. My hair in the shower drain, my smell on your sweaters, bobby pins all over the window sills. I make the best sandwiches you've ever tasted. You'll be in charge of napkins. I can't do a pull-up. But I'm great at excuses. I count broken umbrellas after every thunderstorm, and I fall asleep repeating the words thank you. I will wake you up early with my heavy heartbeat. You will say, Can't we just sleep in, and I will say, No, trust me. You don't want to miss a thing.

Side note: Down here, you're either an Amundsen guy, a Shackleton guy, or a Scott guy. Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole, but he did it by feeding dogs to dogs, which makes Amundsen the Michael Vick of polar explorers: you can like him, but keep it to yourself, or you'll end up getting into arguments with a bunch of fanatics. Shackleton is the Charles Barkley of the bunch: he's a legend, all-star personality, but there's the asterisk that he never reached the Pole, i.e. won a championship. How this turned into a sports analogy, I don't know. Finally, there's Captain Scott, canonized for his failure, and to this day never fully embraced because he was terrible with people. He has my vote, you understand.

You opted in. You didn’t tell them about your asterisks, how you were secretly and privately better than the world you participated in, despite all outward appearances. You thought you could be part of it just a little.

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn't about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end. He just runs. Rain grows in wet crescendo. His footfalls send up fine flowers of water, hanging a second behind his flight.

She finished her drink and put it down. "It's getting chilly out here." "Yes." "Let us repair within." "I'd like to repair." I put down my cigar and we stood and she kissed me. So I put my arm around her trim and sparkling, blue-kept waist and we moved away from the bar, toward the archway, through the archway and beyond, into the house we were leaving. Let's make it a triple-asterisk break: ***

Grayson is in training for the Insufferable Olympics, and we really think he can go all the way if he can just jam that stick a little farther up his—” Asterisk,

I function as an asterisk in the limbic system.

Damn, the good words are all asterisked!” “The men only understand the asterisks. My worry is if they understand the rest!

In the novels I had read whenever lovely woman stooped to folly she had a baby. The cause was put with infinite precaution, sometimes indeed suggested only by a row of asterisks, but the result was inevitable.

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all.

The early Sumerian pictograph for god was an asterisk, the symbol of the stars. The early Aztec word for god was Teotl, and its glyph was a representation of the Sun. The heavens were called Teoatl, the godsea, the cosmic ocean.

the genie’s in the steam People wonder how to make it in life. First of kin with innate ability and a lotta hard work. Yes. But don’t forget the steam. The undefined asterisk and intangible. Some call it juice. Some call it magic. The genie’s in the magic. The magic’s in the steam.

Donald Trump is a terrible, horrible, no-good president. He’ll go down in history with asterisks next to his name for endemic corruption, outrageous stupidity, egregious cruelty, and inhumanity, for diminishing the presidency and the nation, and for being a lout with a terrible wig.

Is that a tentative yes?” “No.” She shook her head. “It’s more like a yes with an asterisk.” “What’s the footnote?” “It’s like ‘yes,’ asterisk, and then ‘Let the record show I think this is probably a bad idea.’” He took her hand again. “But you still want . . . to be with me?” “Cary,” she said, chastising him, “I always want that. I’m obviously in love with you.” “Obviously?” She nodded her head. His eyes were wide again. “Shiloh . . . will you marry me?” “Yes,” she whispered. “Asterisk.” Cary whispered, too: “Let the record show you think this is a bad idea.” “Let the record show I’m terrified of losing you completely.

would read through one of Chris’s books until my eyes gave in to my exhaustion and I could no longer focus. One night as I read from Leo Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, I came across a section where Chris had placed an asterisk in the margin and brackets around the following excerpt: “It is a bad thing,” he said, “not to be able to stand solitude.

The growth of his power and fame was matched, in my imagination, by the degree of the punishment I would have liked to inflict on him. Thus, at first, I would have been content with an electoral defeat, a cooling of public enthusiasm. Later I already required his imprisonment; still later, his exile to some distant, flat island with a single palm tree, which, like a black asterisk, refers one to the bottom of an eternal hell made of solitude, disgrace, and helplessness. Now, at last, nothing but his death could satisfy me.

I'm not an asterisk or a footnote in my own life. I don't have to hold my tongue here, because I'm the fucking star

I looked down at the name that had an asterisk by her name to symbol the utmost importance. “Asha Avery,” I read out loud before frowning. “She must be a big deal amongst the faculty and alumni.

Antarctica is the highest, driest, coldest, and windiest place on the planet. The South Pole averages sixty below zero, has hurricane-strength winds, and sits at an altitude of ten thousand feet. In other words, those original explorers didn’t have to just get there, but had to climb serious mountains to do so. (Side note: Down here, you’re either an Amundsen guy, a Shackleton guy, or a Scott guy. Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole, but he did it by feeding dogs to dogs, which makes Amundsen the Michael Vick of polar explorers: you can like him, but keep it to yourself, or you’ll end up getting into arguments with a bunch of fanatics. Shackleton is the Charles Barkley of the bunch: he’s a legend, all-star personality, but there’s the asterisk that he never reached the Pole, i.e., won a championship. How this turned into a sports analogy, I don’t know. Finally, there’s Captain Scott, canonized for his failure, and to this day never fully embraced because he was terrible with people. He has my vote, you understand.)

Most rightists wanted an autocracy without asterisk—that is, a mystical unity of monarch and folk—and they rejected anything more than a consultative Duma, but the autocrat himself had created the Duma. This

Shackleton is the Charles Barkley of the bunch: he’s a legend, all-star personality, but there’s the asterisk that he never reached the Pole, i.e., won a championship. How this turned into a sports analogy, I don’t know.

Long deep lines, chapters carved in his face by age, question marks, mysterious tales, asterisks, all that the sirens had forgot in the far-reaching solitude of his soul, all that fell from the starry sky, was traced in his face.

I reckon you must get bored more easily than other people.” He came up onto one elbow and looked at her. “Yes. You’ll have your hands full, keeping me excited.” “I don’t remember anything about that in the marriage vows,” she said. “There was obey—I noticed that came first—but I privately added a lengthy footnote to that item.” “This surprises me not at all. But there was the part about serving me.” “It, too, needed a footnote. Then love and honor and keeping you and sticking with you and nobody else. I remember all those. But I don’t recall the minister mentioning anything about keeping you excited.” “That was the serve part. It had an asterisk and some fine print.” “I did not hear any fine print.

Unconditional love is a gift of the heart. It’s a gift that we can both give and receive that comes with no strings attached, no qualifications, reservations, footnotes, asterisks, objections, judgments, or other kinds of fine print legalese that later have to be uncovered, argued over, or cried about.

As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules. These Exceptions were indicated by rows of asterisks and daggers and other more obscure typographical fauna which invited the reader to peruse the many footnotes that cluttered up the margins of magical reference books like Talmudic commentary.

By a divine miracle, the pope of Vatican II taught that Vatican II contained no extraordinary dogma and did not carry the mark of infallibility — meaning the documents of Vatican II are fallible and may contain error. Unlike the previous twenty ecumenical councils, the pope placed an asterisk next to Vatican II.

Use the semicolon like you would use any powerful weapon (your best pick-up line or your most effective push-up bra): carefully and sparingly.

Is it only an hour, he wondered, that encompassed three people’s four orgasms? Now I know why, though foreplay can be delineated in all its fascinating and psychotropic detail, a poet must use asterisks or blank paper for orgasmic mechanics that satisfying: they open to something so wide you can now understand why, when sex is that good, you may say, “The sex is not the most important part,” and feel these words analog some shadow of truth.

when certain married words neglect to wear their apostrophes, they might be mistaken for their single friends: The identity of he’ll just went to hell. She’ll is like a shell of its former self. We’ll looks like it wishes it were a well.

go through and take out as many section breaks within chapters as I could, deleting the white space and other markings between them. (By section break, I mean the smaller divisions of text that sometimes exist within chapters, usually set off by a string of three asterisks or something similar.) Late in my revision, I found that many of these mid-chapter breaks, all of which had seemed so essential, had become unnecessary and that losing those interruptions let my chapters read as more continuous and seamless.

Well, first of all,” Langdon said, “Edmond inscribed this piece in clay as an homage to mankind’s earliest written language, cuneiform.” The woman blinked, looking uncertain. “The three heavy markings in the middle,” Langdon continued, “spell the word ‘fish’ in Assyrian. It’s called a pictogram. If you look carefully, you can imagine the fish’s open mouth facing right, as well as the triangular scales on his body.” The assembled group all cocked their heads, studying the work again. “And if you look over here,” Langdon said, pointing to the series of depressions to the left of the fish, “you can see that Edmond made footprints in the mud behind the fish, to represent the fish’s historic evolutionary step onto land.” Heads began to nod appreciatively. “And finally,” Langdon said, “the asymmetrical asterisk on the right—the symbol that the fish appears to be consuming—is one of history’s oldest symbols for God.” The Botoxed woman turned and scowled at him. “A fish is eating God?” “Apparently so. It’s a playful version of the Darwin fish—evolution consuming religion.” Langdon gave the group a casual shrug. “As I said, pretty clever.

Somehow I knew all things were connected, everything but a point on some continuum. This felt more real to me than anything I was ever to learn in any class or read in any book. This feeling of resonance became my standard, so when a teacher told me something or I read something in a book, if I didn’t feel the depth of resonance I found in the woods I never completely accepted what I was reading or being taught. I learned to give the right answers to pass tests and complete assignments, but if I didn’t feel resonance, I posted a mental asterisk on that fact or concept.

We preach grace, but we don’t always practice it. We talk about God’s mercy, but we don’t always want the people who need it most to know it or get in on it. We say we are in the redemption business, but the door to that redemption is often locked by us from the inside. We say, “Come in! All are welcome!” but “all” is often marked with an asterisk. How, I ask, can the world change – how can heaven come to earth – if we stingily protest against God for his grace to others, grace we have freely received ourselves? How can we pray “thy kingdom come,” and be resentful toward God and those he allows to enter the kingdom in his way and his timing?

God loves everybody, exactly the same. No matter what you do. If you grew up like me, then you are waiting for the asterisk to that sentence. Sure, God loves everybody the same. *But he really likes it when you go to Africa. Or start a food kitchen. Or adopt through foster care. Or buy cool, overpriced shoes that may or may not give an orphan in some nameless country a complimentary pair. Or turn your TV into a garden for succulents. Or whatever it is that we believe we must do in order to be fully loved. God took away my asterisk, and now I don’t know how to classify myself anymore. I’m just a sheep of his hand, and it is more lowly and lovely than I could have ever imagined.

Oftentimes, people meet our writing before they meet us; our writing is our first impression.People read our résumés, cover letters, proposals, and emails, and that's the basis on which we are judged first. If our writing is full of grammar and punctuation errors, even though the content may be great, it’s like wearing a beautifully made Prada dress that has deodorant stains

I am in awe of Sam's decision to abandon capitals and punctuation but am not brave enough to do the same. I like to imagine the day he, as the Americans say, made the change he wished to see in the world. I like to think it came to him suddenly. Perhaps he was swimming - no, too active - or napping indoors on a hot day - no, too bourgeois - probably he was in Scotland during the midge season and he left the desk lamp on and the window open when he went out for a meaningful walk. It was dark and the midges were drawn to the lamplight and - thinking it was the moon - fried themselves against the bulb, falling in their tens and tens, cooked on the pages of Sam's poems. So when he returned some time later, with bites on his neck, he found his poems loaded with punctuation, asterisks, grammar lying dead on his manuscript and his instant reaction was disgust, a feeling that then infected his whole aesthetic.

Consider the simpler problem of natural evils and accidents (falling masonry, flooding, car crashes, virulent flus, etc.). For God to deliver us from all natural pains, the laws of physics would have to be studded with asterisks specifying all the times that flying, twisted metal would need to flout the conservation of linear momentum to stop just short of breaking our bones.

You will find no asterisks beside the biblical exhortations to exercise self-control. What you will find is a truckload of commands to resist evil, flee lust, avoid temptation, abstain from sin, control your tongue, guard your heart, and, most graphically, kill the flesh.

It’s the palette of an A24 movie made flesh, and it feels powerful. I am the main character, whom things are taken from, won then irrevocably lost, but while the open ending isn’t quite hopeful, at least it’s still about me. I’m not an asterisk or a footnote in my own life. I don’t have to hold my tongue here, because I’m the fucking star.

I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks

I like to believe I can go anywhere in this country, but that belief comes with a big asterisk called history.

I love you period. Do you love me question mark? Please please exclamation point I want to hold you in parentheses. These lyrics prompted Jeannine M. San Giovanni to write: “This song makes me sick to my colon. I’d like to kick the author in his asterisk.

Of course." She smiled slowly. "Well, I didn't need to get all dressed then, did I?" She had a way, all right. The words came out like asterisks, or the dots at the end of jazzy paragraphs in books.

I believe in true love," she said. He nodded again. "But I clearly don't know it when I see it. How can I ever say 'I love you' again? I'll have to asterisk it - 'I think I love you, but the only other time I said this, I was wrong. I don't actually know what love looks or feels like. I think I love you, but what do I know?

For years, President Obama and his top officials vehemently denounced China for using its surveillance capabilities for economic advantage while insisting that the United States and its allies never do any such thing. The Washington Post quoted an NSA spokesperson saying that the Department of Defense, of which the agency is a part, “ ‘does engage’ in computer network exploitation,” but “does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including ‘cyber’ ” [emphatic asterisks in the original]. That the NSA spies for precisely the economic motive it has denied is proven by its own documents. The agency acts for the benefit of what it calls its “customers,” a list that includes not only the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but also primarily economic agencies, such as the US Trade Representative and the Departments of Agriculture, Treasury, and Commerce:

The boy who had scolded her was Dirk Eberwein, the first non-Genestella in the history of the Le Wolfe Black Institute to reach the rank of student council president. There

If this book were just about nostalgia, or highlights from my career, it would just reinforce a version of the story I never found particularly interesting. The trophies, the scoring titles, the Stanley Cups—that’s all in the history books now. But like that famous photo, or the statue outside the TD Garden, they don’t tell you much. They don’t speak to values or to motivation. They don’t explain inspiration, or add asterisks for the people who helped me (or pushed me). They record, in the simplest way, what happened on the ice, not how I got there, or who I met along the way and what I learned from them.

I am the English teacher who teaches the “boring stuff”— I teach a class on grammar called Writing Skills.

I am the English teacher who teaches the “boring stuff”— I teach a class on grammar called Writing Skills. My students think I love grammar. That just says one thing to me: I chose the wrong profession— I should have been an actress. I don’t love grammar. Loving grammar is like loving oatmeal.

If our writing is full of grammar and punctuation errors, even though the content may be great, it’s like wearing a beautifully made Prada dress that has deodorant stains.

But spell check and grammar check are like vodka: they are definitely helpful but shouldn’t be solely relied on to solve our problems.

Spelling can be as elusive as the female orgasm.

(Lay) Yesterday, he laid the leather whip down by the handcuffs. (Lie) Five minutes ago, she told him to lay down on the floor and bark like a dog.

Incorrect: I use to be the most popular guy in school, but now I am the Thursday night trivia king at the local bar. Correct: I used to be the most popular guy in school, but now I am the Thursday night trivia king at the local bar.

Dictionaries are like vitamins and floss; we buy them and then never use them. Even I, an English teacher, a lover of words, have a huge dictionary on my desk, and I never, ever open it.

The difference between lay and lie is like the difference between sadism and masochism: one means doing something to someone (or something) else, while the other means doing it to oneself.

Affect: To produce a change in Effect: Something that is produced, a result or consequence

Rule #6 – Always tell everyone what they want to hear. That nondesigner dress is absolutely divine. World peace is very important to me. I had no idea that sex tape would be released.

For example, in English we would write Dear Staff, I would like to recognize Sarah’s outstanding performance. In Slang we would write Hey Homies, Shout out to Sarah for doin’ her thing. In Cyber we would write dear staff i wld like 2 ACK sarah 4 her per4manz

Lacks commitment: I suppose I could marry Dan. Acknowledges commitment: I’m supposed to marry Dan.

We use the en dash when we want to express a range of values: Goldilocks will only sleep on Egyptian cotton sheets with a 300–400 thread count. She only eats porridge that is 98–100 degrees.

Like an exclamation point, the em dash may be used to provide emphasis, but the exclamation point must go at the end of a sentence—the em dash can go anywhere: There’s a little blonde girl—in my bed. None of my porridge—not even one little drop—is left.

The closest we can get to set hyphen rules are that the prefixes ex, self, and all always require hyphens while adverbs ending in ly never do: Goldilocks first told the jury that she had been walking through the dimly lit forest and mistook the three bears’ house for an all-inclusive resort. When the jury seemed skeptical, she changed her story and said she had been in a highly emotional state and was suffering from low self-esteem because her ex-boyfriend Jack left her to climb a beanstalk.

In high school, I was such a slut. And I was not alone; most girls in my high school were total sluts. We didn’t sleep around or have loose morals, but for some reason, in high school, slut was the insult of choice.

Not only can rearranging our sentences to avoid ending them in prepositions sound pretentious, it’s also unnecessary. Grammar experts agree that it’s perfectly acceptable to end sentences in prepositions

Even is such a dependable word. It means steady, unchanging. Though, on the other hand, is the opposite. It means despite the fact that, which means it is always dealing with varying circumstances. Though would be too much drama for even.

One of the most pressing questions of our time is arguably this: Does size matter? Is it about quantity or quality? Is it the size of the boat or the motion of the ocean? Is it the length of the magic wand or the power of the spell? Obviously, I am referring to sentence size.

Subject = Boat Verb = Sank Completes a thought = If you went up to someone and said, “The big boat sank,” the person may think that it’s a weird way to start the conversation, but he or she would understand what happened.

If you want to see a truly long sentence, pick up a copy of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which reportedly contains a 4,391 word sentence. And when you’re finished with that one, Jonathan Coe’s book The Rotters Club contains a sentence made up of 13,955 words.

A run-on sentence is when we fuse two or more sentences together without using any punctuation to separate them. For example: I had the strangest dream last night on my couch Johnny Depp was whispering sweet nothings in my ear my mom was telling me to clean my room.

A comma splice means that a comma has been inserted between two complete sentences.

So we’re seemingly in quite a pickle. Sometimes a period provides too much pause between these two sentences, but the comma doesn’t provide enough. Luckily, the period and the comma had a drunken one-night stand and produced this adorable little spawn they named the semicolon.

The semicolon, my friends, is the punctuation mark we use to join two complete sentences. When we want to separate two complete sentences, we use the period. When we want to hold them together, we use the semicolon.

We might also want to use a semicolon to hold together two sentences to avoid giving the reader too much time to think about the first sentence before we hit them with the second one. For example, let’s say that I was writing an email to my husband explaining why the bank account might not be quite as full as it was earlier in the day. I might include this sentence: I just bought a plane ticket to Cabo; Sharon just went through a divorce and she needs me.

Forget about how you feel about the comma. I know it’s small and cute and curvy, but we’ve got to harden our hearts and use our heads.

For And Nor But Or Yet So And you know what to do: when you see one of these little fellows in a sentence, stop, look both ways, see if there’s a complete sentence on each side. If there is, insert a comma; if there’s not, keep on walking.

First impressions stick. That’s why it’s so important that we do tedious things like remember to wear deodorant, brush our teeth, and insert commas in the correct places. I mean, imagine what you would think of me if these were the first sentences of mine that you met: When I eat my sister always picks off my plate. If you’re ever in the mood to give head over to the local charity.

Guys who kiss like they’re giving CPR should have to attend kissing classes. If I take out “who kiss like they’re giving CPR,” this is my sentence: Guys should have to attend kissing classes.

When it comes to matters of the comma, don’t follow your heart—follow the rules.