Punctuation Marks Quotes

Hope. It's like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It's a fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. And it's the only thing in the world keeping me afloat.

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

The key to a successful relationship isn’t just in the words, it’s in the choice of punctuation. When you’re in love with someone, a well-placed question mark can be the difference between bliss and disaster, and a deeply respected period or a cleverly inserted ellipsis can prevent all kinds of exclamations.

Dying isn’t the important thing. It’s nothing more than the punctuation mark on the end of your life. It’s everything that came before that matters. Punctuation marks, most people skip right over them. They don’t even have a sound.

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

I want a pocketful of punctuation marks to end the thoughts he’s forced into my head.

I'm petrified. Because being this close to you is doing things to me. Strange things and irrational things and things that flutter against my chest and braid my bones to ether. I want a pocketful of punctuation marks to end the thoughts he's forced into my head.

...punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

We have one of those conversations where every thing clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement.

smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

Yes, librarians use punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they'd wear it out.

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.

Fiction builds empathy. Fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.

What sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man.

Twenty-six letters and some punctuation marks and you have infinite words in infinite worlds. How is that not a miracle?

... my private thoughts, feelings I captured with a tortured mind and hammered into sentences I shoved into paragraphs, ideas I pinned together with punctuation marks that serve no function but to determine where one thought ends and another begins.

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.

Listen and learn: you need fourteen characters, minimum. Use random letters, not words. Here’s a tip: think of a sentence, and use the first letter in each of those words. Mix it up between upper and lower case. Then pick two numbers that mean something to you – not dates – and stick them somewhere between the letters. Put a punctuation mark at the beginning of the password and then a symbol, like a dollar sign, at the end.

Terrorism” is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence— our violence—which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing “commentators” of the American east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks.

Punctuationally speaking, wonder is a period at the end of a statement we've long taken for granted, suddenly looking up and seeing the sinuous curve of a tall black hat on its head, and realizing it was a question mark all along.

Addie," he breathes, and the sound sends sparks across her skin, and when he kisses her, he tastes like salt, and summer. But it feels too much like a punctuation mark, and she isn't ready for the night to end, so she kisses him back, deeper, turns the period into a question, into an answer.

My, my," he said, looking the note over. "If only students would write this much in their essays. One of you has considerably worse writing than the other, so forgive me if I get anything wrong here." He cleared his throat."'So, I saw J last night,' begins the person with bad handwriting, to which the response is,'What happened,' followed by no fewer than five question marks. Understandable, since sometimes one—let alone four—just won't get the point across, eh?" The class laughed, and I noticed Mia throwing me a particularly mean smile. "The first speaker responds:'What do you think happened? We hooked up in one of the empty lounges.'“ Mr. Nagy glanced up after hearing some more giggles in the room. His British accent only added to the hilarity. "May I assume by this reaction that the use of 'hook up' pertains to the more recent, shall we say,carnal application of the term than the tamer one I grew up with?” More snickers ensued. Straightening up, I said boldly, "Yes, sir, Mr. Nagy. That would be correct, sir." A number of people in the class laughed outright. "Thank you for that confirmation, Miss Hathaway. Now, where was I? Ah yes, the other speaker then asks,'How was it?' The response is,'Good,' punctuated with a smiley face to confirm said adjective. Well. I suppose kudos are in order for the mysterious J, hmmm?'So, like, how far did you guys go?' Uh, ladies," said Mr. Nagy, "I do hope this doesn't surpass a PG rating.'Not very.We got caught.'And again, we are shown the severity of the situation, this time through the use of a not-smiling face.'What happened?' 'Dimitri showed up. He threw Jesse out and then bitched me out.'“ The class lost it, both from hearing Mr. Nagy say "bitched" and from finally getting some participants named. "Why, Mr.Zeklos, are you the aforementioned J? The one who earned a smiley face from the sloppy writer?

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile

So, have you seen Flood?" she asked. "Cop?" She added "cop" with a high pop on the p, like it was a punctuation mark, not a profession

Note: When reading dry political theory, such as the texts you will find on the following pages, it may be useful to apply the Exclamation Point Test from time to time, to determine if the material you are reading is actually relevant to your life. To apply this test, simply go through the text replacing all the punctuation marks at the ends of the sentences with exclamation points. If the results sound absurd when read aloud, then you know you're wasting your time.

That's why they came up with the emoticon, too—the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.

As you can see, the hyphen is a nasty, tricky, evil little mark that gets its kicks igniting arguments in newsrooms and trying to make everyone in the English-speaking world look like an idiot - it's the Bill Maher of punctuation.

At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper. At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts. The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional.

Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting? I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.

When speaking aloud, you punctuate constantly — with body language. Your listener hears commas, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks as you shout, whisper, pause, wave your arms, roll your eyes, wrinkle your brow. In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear the way you want to be heard.

Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above her heart.

[Celebrations] are the punctuation marks that make sense of the passage of time; without them, there are no beginnings and endings. Life becomes an endless series of Wednesdays.

So the fire and its subsequent flood, wich destroyed everything left that was not flammable and added a particularly noisome flux to the survivors'problems, did not mark its end. Rather it was a fiery punctuation mark, a coal-like comma, or salamander semicolon, in a continuing story.

April 6—Today, I learned, the comma, this is, a, comma (,) a period, with, a tail, Miss Kinnian, says its, importent, because, it makes writing, better, she said, somebody, could lose, a lot, of money, if a comma, isnt in, the right, place, I got, some money, that I, saved from, my job, and what, the foundation, pays me, but not, much and, I dont see how, a comma, keeps, you from, losing it, But, she says, everybody, uses commas, so Ill, use them, too,,,, April 7—I used the comma wrong. Its punctuation…Miss Kinnian says a period is punctuation too, and there are lots of other marks to learn. She said; You, got. to-mix?them!up: She showd? me” how, to mix! them; up, and now! I can. mix (up all? kinds of punctuation— in, my. writing! There” are lots, of rules; to learn? but. Im’ get’ting them in my head: One thing? I, like: about, Dear Miss Kinnian: (thats, the way? it goes; in a business letter (if I ever go! into business?) is that, she: always; gives me’ a reason” when—I ask. She”s a gen’ius! I wish? I could be smart-like-her; Punctuation, is? fun!

Writers jealous of their individual style are obliged to wring the utmost effect from a tiny range of marks – which explains why they get so desperate when their choices are challenged (or corrected) by copy-editors legislating according to a “house style”.

is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.

Perhaps in time, Ella, the words we have lost will fade, and we will all stop summoning them by habit, only to stamp them out like unwanted toadstools when they appear. Perhaps they will eventually disappear altogether, and the accompanying halts and stammers as well: those troublesome, maddening pauses that at present invade and punctuate through caesura all manner of discourse. Trying so desperately we all are, to be ever so careful.

humorous writing, the exclamation mark is the equivalent of canned laughter (F. Scott Fitzgerald – that well-known knockabout gag-man – said it was like laughing at your own jokes),

It was cool to see reading become such a transparent act - it was as if her face had a different expression for each punctuation mark, and when there was dialogue you could see her actually listening to it in her head.

Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons; shrivelling question marks on the garden path under a powerful magnifying glass; you name it.

There's an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It's insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented.

They were waiting for me in the books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words, when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner of exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me, in the pages of books.

Leaves have fallen onto the snow like punctuation marks. They've held on for so long, but winter gets to us all in the end.

The man credited with inventing the comma, colon, and full stop punctuation marks was a librarian of Alexandria called Aristophanes.

I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before. In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras!They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want. Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.

I think for a minute. Watching my wife fade into the distance, I put a hand on my heart. "Dead." I wave a hand toward my wife. "Dead." My eyes drift toward the sky and lose their focus. "Want it...to hurt. But...doesn't." Julie looks at me like she's waiting for more, and I wonder if I've expressed anything at all with my halting, mumbled soliloquy. Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting? I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

In France, we leave a single space before and after most punctuation marks. In England, there are generally no spaces before punctuation, and one inserts a double space between sentences.

I felt an ending in that kiss. It was a period, a punctuation mark, and at the time I thought it was the end of the chapter. But later, I would mark it as the end of it all, the end of my addiction, my last taste of whiskey, my final dance with fire.

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

Here is an appropriate use of the exclamation mark: The last thing he expected when the elevator door opened was the snarling tiger that leapt at him. "Ahhhhh!" ... In almost all situations that do not involve immediate physical danger or great surprise, you should think twice before using an exclamation mark. If you have thought twice and the exclamation mark is still there, think about it three times, or however many times it takes until you delete it.

Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers.

The eyebrows are the punctuation marks of the face.

Yes! Practice-singular!' the wise men screamed in unison. Three index fingers, like punctuation marks, jumped to attention in the air to emphasize their point (Life of Pi 68).

Sometimes you know that you are destined to die, but somehow you are given a parenthesis after the punctuation mark: more years, more time that wasn’t meant for you but still was meant for you, a bridge stretching out into the stars, a confidence built of invisible threads, a miracle.

Many contemporaries of Proust’s insisted that he wrote the way he spoke, although when Du côté de chez Swann appeared in print, they were startled by what they saw as the severity of the page. Where were the pauses, the inflections? There were not enough empty spaces, not enough punctuation marks. To them, the sentences seemed longer when read on the page than they did when they were spoken, in his extraordinary hoarse voice: his voice punctuated them. One friend, though surely exaggerating, reported that Proust would arrive late in the evening, wake him up, begin talking, and deliver one long sentence that did not come to an end until the middle of the night. The sentence would be full of asides, parentheses, illuminations, reconsiderations, revisions, addenda, corrections, augmentations, digressions, qualifications, erasures, deletions, and marginal notes.

So what happened to the comma in this process? Well, between the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a “separator” (punctuation marks are traditionally either “separators” or “terminators”) that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organising words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory “woof” to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom.

Punctuation has been defined many ways. Some grammarians use the analogy of stitching: punctuation as the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another writer tells us that punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. I have even seen a rather fanciful reference to the full stop and comma as “the invisible servants in fairy tales – the ones who bring glasses of water and pillows, not storms of weather or love”. But best of all, I think, is the simple advice given by the style book of a national newspaper: that punctuation is “a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling”.

How deaf and stupid I have been, he thought, walking on quickly. When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion. I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened.

It was cool to see reading become such a transparent act–it was as if her face had a different expression for each punctuation mark, and when there was dialogue you could see her actually listening to it in her head.

There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows.

War is often described as long periods of boredom, punctuated by moments of terror. A description that is functionally identical to many people's lives.

down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat. “I never did see

As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket.

I suppose this is a trivial matter but I do want to object to the maddening fuss-fidget punctuation which one of your editors is attempting to impose on my story. I said it before but I'll say it again, that unless necessary for clarity of meaning I would prefer a minimum of goddamn commas, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and fucking (most obscene of all punctuation marks) semi-colons. I've had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript. [Regarding "The Monkey Wrench Gang"]

Clicking on "send" has its limitations as a system of subtle communication. Which is why, of course, people use so many dashes and italics and capitals ("I AM joking!") to compensate. That's why they came up with the emoticon, too—the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne. You will know all about emoticons. Emoticons are the proper name for smileys. And a smiley is, famously, this: :—) Forget the idea of selecting the right words in the right order and channelling the reader's attention by means of artful pointing. Just add the right emoticon to your email and everyone will know what self-expressive effect you thought you kind-of had in mind. Anyone interested in punctuation has a dual reason to feel aggrieved about smileys, because not only are they a paltry substitute for expressing oneself properly; they are also designed by people who evidently thought the punctuation marks on the standard keyboard cried out for an ornamental function. What's this dot-on-top-of-a-dot thing for? What earthly good is it? Well, if you look at it sideways, it could be a pair of eyes. What's this curvy thing for? It's a mouth, look! Hey, I think we're on to something. :—( Now it's sad! ;—) It looks like it's winking! :—r It looks like it's sticking its tongue out! The permutations may be endless: :~/ mixed up! <:—) dunce! :—[ pouting! :—O surprise! Well, that's enough. I've just spotted a third reason to loathe emoticons, which is that when they pass from fashion (and I do hope they already have), future generations will associate punctuation marks with an outmoded and rather primitive graphic pastime and despise them all the more. "Why do they still have all these keys with things like dots and spots and eyes and mouths and things?" they will grumble. "Nobody does smileys any more.

War is often described as long periods of boredom, punctuated by moments of terror. A description that is functionally identical to many people’s lives. The Pursuit of Happiness, by Alfred J. Prooffrock

Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there's the information highway. We don't need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face.

He stood in the doorway of her office. He was, as always, the consummate scoundrel. He leaned against the doorframe, smiling—almost smirking—at her, as if he knew how rapidly her heart had started beating. If that was how they were going to do this… She simply raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Oh,” she said with a sniff. “It’s you.” “You’re not fooling anyone,” he said. She could feel the corner of her mouth twitch up. Last time she’d seen him, he’d kissed her so thoroughly she had not yet recovered. “I’m not?” “I heard it most distinctly,” he told her. “You might have said ‘It’s you,’ but there was a distinct exclamation mark at the end. In fact, I think there were two.” “Oh, dear.” Free looked down, fluttering her eyelashes demurely. “Is my punctuation showing once more?” His eyes darkened and he took a step into her office. “Don’t hide it on my account,” he growled. “You have the most damnably beautiful punctuation that I have ever seen.

The writing life is punctuated by words, sentences, paragraph & pages. And by spurts of elation, inspiration, rejection & despair.

Punctuation is to words as cartilage is to bone, permitting articulation and bearing stress.

The prisoner of doubt ends his stint [through suicide], released to the custody of that final question mark which punctuates every life sentence.

At times I've felt less like a punctuation theorist than like a punctuation therapist

i want a pocket of punctuation marks to end the thoughts he has forced into my head

A temherte slaq is an Ethiopian punctuation mark used to denote sarcasm.

Death demands its own designated punctuation mark. Maybe: ______ died/ It is a dividing line / everything on this side is different.

...just as Elsa opens Audi's door to jump out, he (Dad) turns to her hesitantly and says in a low voice: "...but there are moments when I sincerely hope that not ALL your best traits come from Granny and Mum, Elsa." And then Elsa squeezes her eyes together tightly and puts her forehead against his shoulder and her fingers into her jacket pocket and spins the lid of the red felt-tip pen that he gave her when she was small, so she could add her own punctuation marks, and which is still the best present he's ever given her. Or anyone. "You gave me your words," she whispers.

Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end. Whenever she came in here, Aomame felt as if she had lost all sense of time.

Hey Kid-- so proud of you. so is emily. we wish we could be there, but here's a fat check to make up for it but dont go spending it all out on booze. call you soon. Love, the best big brother ever and Emily and Marie, too." I smiled. It was a mark of how much I loved my big brother that I found his lack of punctuation and proper grammar endearing.

Sometimes a face could be so simple: even a couple of dark spots on a lighter surface or a dark oval in the distance might be a face. An electrical socket could be a face, a mailbox or a couple of punctuation marks could congeal suddenly into something with an expression. Our faces, on the other hand, were made of hundreds of different parts, each part separate and tenuous and capable of being ugly, each part waiting for a product designed to isolate and act upon it.

The pirates trooped in like a sentence full of adjectives, adverbs, and exclamation marks, punctuated finally by the tiny black full stop of Verisimilitude Jones, who was generally called, or more precisely, screamed, "Millie the Monster".

Hope. It’s like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It’s fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. And it’s the only thing in the world keeping me afloat.

In the United States, periods and commas go inside the quotation mark. In Britain, they go outside the quotation mark. Squiggly said, “No.” (United States) Squiggly said, “No”. (Britain)   “No,” said Squiggly. (United States) “No”, said Squiggly. (Britain)

It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard. ‘Is Leela self who write that,’ Ramlogan said. ‘I didn’t ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it off.’ It read: NOTICE NOTICE, IS. HEREBY; PROVIDED: THAT, SEATS! ARE, PROVIDED. FOR; FEMALE: SHOP, ASSISTANTS! Ganesh said, ‘Leela know a lot of punctuation marks.’ That is it, sahib. All day the girl just sitting down and talking about these puncturation marks. She is like that, sahib.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of 26 phonetic symbols, 10 numbers, and about 8 punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

My father." I don't even know what punctuation mark to put after those two words. Lots of exclamation points!!! One lonely question mark? I need a cartoon balloon with every symbol available in it. Something that stands for stunned/terrified/pissed off/excited/depressed/happy/mad.

He lives at Balbec?” crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.

The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak farce of K’s encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center experience.

It was the first letter, the first word, the first sentence with no punctuation mark in sight. It was a beautiful, messy beginning, an honest truth written in script, in a handwriting with loops and curves only we could decipher. It was real. It was painful. It was healing. And most of all, it was ours.

No institution of learning of Ingersoll's day had courage enough to confer upon him an honorary degree; not only for his own intellectual accomplishments, but also for his influence upon the minds of the learned men and women of his time and generation. Robert G. Ingersoll never received a prize for literature. The same prejudice and bigotry which prevented his getting an honorary college degree, militated against his being recognized as 'the greatest writer of the English language on the face of the earth,' as Henry Ward Beecher characterized him. Aye, in all the history of literature, Robert G. Ingersoll has never been excelled -- except by only one man, and that man was -- William Shakespeare. And yet there are times when Ingersoll even surpassed the immortal Bard. Yes, there are times when Ingersoll excelled even Shakespeare, in expressing human emotions, and in the use of language to express a thought, or to paint a picture. I say this fully conscious of my own admiration for that 'intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the shores of thought.' Ingersoll was perfection himself. Every word was properly used. Every sentence was perfectly formed. Every noun, every verb and every object was in its proper place. Every punctuation mark, every comma, every semicolon, and every period was expertly placed to separate and balance each sentence. To read Ingersoll, it seems that every idea came properly clothed from his brain. Something rare indeed in the history of man's use of language in the expression of his thoughts. Every thought came from his brain with all the beauty and perfection of the full blown rose, with the velvety petals delicately touching each other. Thoughts of diamonds and pearls, rubies and sapphires rolled off his tongue as if from an inexhaustible mine of precious stones. Just as the cut of the diamond reveals the splendor of its brilliance, so the words and construction of the sentences gave a charm and beauty and eloquence to Ingersoll's thoughts. Ingersoll had everything: The song of the skylark; the tenderness of the dove; the hiss of the snake; the bite of the tiger; the strength of the lion; and perhaps more significant was the fact that he used each of these qualities and attributes, in their proper place, and at their proper time. He knew when to embrace with the tenderness of affection, and to resist and denounce wickedness and tyranny with that power of denunciation which he, and he alone, knew how to express.

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.

Reading is a very strange thing. We get talked to about it and talk explicitly about it in first grade and second grade and third grade, and then it all devolves into interpretation. But if you think about what’s going on when you read, you’re processing information at an incredible rate. One measure of how good the writing is is how little effort it requires for the reader to track what’s going on. For example, I am not an absolute believer in standard punctuation at all times, but one thing that’s often a big shock to my students is that punctuation isn’t merely a matter of pacing or how you would read something out loud. These marks are, in fact, cues to the reader for how very quickly to organize the various phrases and clauses of the sentence so the sentence as a whole makes sense.

The structure of the human genome can thus be likened to a sentence that reads- This......is the......str...uc......ture...,,,...of...your...(...gen...ome...)... - where the words correspond to the genes, the ellipses correspond to the spacers and stuffers, and the occasional punctuation marks demarcate the regulatory sequence of genes.

Father raised his hands. "Gentlemen, gentlemen,please!" he interjected. "I would like to remind you there is freedom of practice in this country." Three apoplectic faces turned to him. "Yes! Practice--singular!" the wise men screa,ed in unison. Three index fingers, like punctuation marks, jumped to attention in the air to emphasize their point.

And then Elsa squeezes her eyes together tightly and puts her forehead against his shoulder and her fingers into her jacket pocket and spins the lid of the red felt-tip pen that he gave her when she was small, so she could add her own punctuation marks, and which is still the best present he's ever given her. Or anyone. You gave me your words, she whispers.

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.

Every act of communication is a miracle of translation. At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potentials in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper. At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up optic nerves, cross the chasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts. The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional. Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.

At first, the letters were arrayed in alphabetical order, an arrangement hinted at on modern keyboards by the sequences F-G-H, J-K-L and O-P, but the fact that no two other letters are alphabetical, that the most popular letters are not only banished to the periphery but given mostly to the left hand while the right is left with a sprinkling of secondary letters, punctuation marks and little-used symbols, are vivid reminders of the extent to which Sholes had to abandon common sense and order just to make the damn thing work. There is a certain piquant irony in the thought that every time you stab ineptly at the letter a with the little finger of your left hand, you are commemorating the engineering inadequacies of a nineteenth-century inventor.

The question marks were piling up and I wasn't even ?uestlove yet. But Amir had questions, too, and the fishhook of the punctuation wasn't catching anything, and it wasn't straightening out either.

I startle, breathing faster, grateful he can only sense the general direction of my feelings and not more than that. For a moment I actually want to say no. No, I’m not scared. I’m petrified. Because being this close to you is doing things to me. Strange things and irrational things and things that flutter against my chest and braid my bones together. I want a pocketful of punctuation marks to end the thoughts he’s forced into my head.

Rilke had a line...something about fishes. Or was that by someone else? Too much had already been written, too many pages, too many words. Maybe writers would be better to just stop, himself included, so that people could catch up. Maybe one day they'd reach a limit. No more books would be able to fit into the universe's bookshelves, not another paragraph squeezed in, not even a punctuation mark. Writers would have to find something else to do. It might be the best thing.

4. Or else: Rough draft of a letter I think of you, often sometimes I go back into a cafe, I ist near the door, I order a coffee I arrange my packet of cigarettes, a box of matches, a writing pad, my felt-pen on the fake marble table I Spend a long time stirring my cup of coffee with the teasspoon (yet I don't put any sugar in my coffee, I drink it allowing the sugar to melt in my mouth, like the people of North, like the Russians and Poles when they drink tea) I pretend to be precoccupied, to be reflecting, as if I had a decision to make At the top and to the right of the sheet of paaper, I inscribe the date, sometimes the place, sometimes the time, I pretend to be writing a letter I write slowly, very slowly, as slowly as I can, I trace, I draw each letter, each accent, I check the punctuation marks I stare attentively at a small notice, the price-list for ice-creams, at a piece of ironwork, a blind, the hexagonal yellow ashtray (in actual fact, it's an equilaterial triangle, in the cutoff corners of which semi-circular dents have been made where cigarettes can be rested) (...) Outside there's a bit of sunlight the cafe is nearly empty two renovatior's men are having a rum at the bar, the owner is dozing behind his till, the waitress is cleaning the coffee machine I am thinking of you you are walking in your street, it's wintertime, you've turned up your foxfur collar, you're smiling, and remote (...)

All too frequently we take a different view of our trials and temptations. We tend to see them as isolated nightmares. God, however, sees them from a different perspective. They are important and connected punctuation marks in the biography of grace He is writing in our lives. They give formation, direction, and character to our lives. They are all part of the tapestry He is weaving in history. He uses them to build up our strength and to prepare us to surmount greater obstacles, perhaps fiercer temptations.

It is not known that Litvinoff’s favorite flower was the peony. That his favorite form of punctuation was the question mark. That he had terrible dreams and could only fall asleep, if he could fall asleep at all, with a glass of warm milk. That he often imagined his own death. That he thought the woman who loved him was wrong to. That he was flat-footed. That his favorite food was the potato. That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, “Good day,” Litvinoff often paused so long to weigh the evidence that by the time he’d settled on an answer the person had gone on his way, leaving him standing alone. These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down.

And Homo sapiens only then becomes man in the complete sense of the word, when his punctuation includes no question marks, only exclamation points, commas, and periods. And you, being children, may swallow without crying all the bitter things I am to give you only if they be coated with the syrup of adventures.

Over my entire career in editing, I don't think I've encountered more than half a dozen difficult authors. By "difficult," I mean a writer who simply does not want changes made to his manuscript and is not even prepared to discuss them. We know the stereotypes: The hotshot journalist jealous of every comma. The poet who claims that his misspellings and eccentric punctuation are inspired. Assistant professors writing a first book for tenure are notorious for their inflexibility, and understandably so: their futures are at stake. They take editing personally; red marks on their manuscripts are like little stab wounds. And then there are vain authors who quarrel when we lowercase their job titles, who want their photos plastered all over the piece or their names in larger type. And don't get me started on writers who don't know what they're talking about, writers who are your boss, writers who are former high school English teachers.

You’re saying your mother engaged in unprotected sex outside her primary relationship?’ ‘With some other student,’ replied Rosie. ‘While she was dating my’ – at this point Rosie raised her hands and made a downwards movement, twice, with the index and middle fingers of both hands – ‘father. My real dad’s a doctor. I just don’t know which one. Really, really pisses me off.’ I was fascinated by the hand movements and silent for a while as I tried to work them out. Were they a sign of distress at not knowing who her father was? If so, it was not one I was familiar with. And why had she chosen to punctuate her speech at that point … of course! Punctuation! ‘Quotation marks,’ I said aloud as the idea hit me. ‘What?’ ‘You made quotation marks around “father” to draw attention to the fact that the word should not be interpreted in the usual way. Very clever.’ ‘Well, there you go,’ she said. ‘And there I was thinking you were reflecting on my minor problem with my whole fucking life. And might have something intelligent to say.’ I corrected her. ‘It’s not a minor problem at all!’ I pointed my finger in the air to indicate an exclamation mark. ‘You should insist on being informed.’ I stabbed the same finger to indicate a full stop. This was quite fun.

I’m guessing this elaborate kidnapping isn’t to force me into that tea I rudely turned down a while back, is it?” I ask, my shaky tone betraying my will to sound calm and composed. She flashes me a fanged smile, but the fangs recede so quickly that I almost worry I simply imagined it. “You’re awfully calm for a girl being abducted. This sort of thing happen to you very often?” “It’s usually the start of a bad day. In this case, it’s just the exclamation mark to punctuate the bad day,” I state evenly, getting my voice under control. She moves, and I startle a little. I see her grinning from her profile like my fear is pleasing to her. I knew she was crazy.

For ‘terrorists’, read ‘guerrillas’ or – as President Ronald Reagan would call them in the years to come – ‘freedom fighters’. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always ‘terrorists’. In the seventeenth century, governments used ‘heretic’ in much the same way, to end all dialogue, to prescribe obedience.

One was the moon that had always been there, and the other was a far smaller, greenish moon, somewhat lopsided in shape, and much less bright. It looked like a poor, ugly, distantly related child that had been foisted on the family by unfortunate events and was welcomed by no one. But it was undeniably there, neither a phantom nor an optical illusion, hanging in space like other heavenly bodies, a solid mass with a clear-cut outline. Not a plane, not a blimp, not an artificial satellite, not a papier-mâché moon that someone made for fun. It was without a doubt a chunk of rock, having quietly, stubbornly settled on a position in the night sky, like a punctuation mark placed only after long deliberation or a mole bestowed by destiny.

We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don’t evidently realize that there are fundamentals. Many people—people who make posters for leading publishers, write captions for the BBC, compose letters and advertisements for important institutions—seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle through any collection of words as if from a salt shaker. Here is a headline, exactly as presented, from a magazine ad for a private school in York: “Ranked by the daily Telegraph the top Northern Co-Educational day and Boarding School for Academic results.” All those capital letters are just random. Does anyone really think that the correct rendering of the newspaper is “the daily Telegraph”? Is it really possible to be that unobservant? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Not long ago, I received an e-mail from someone at the Department for Children, Schools and Families asking me to take part in a campaign to help raise appreciation for the quality of teaching in Great Britain. Here is the opening line of the message exactly as it was sent to me: “Hi Bill. Hope alls well. Here at the Department of Children Schools and Families…” In the space of one line, fourteen words, the author has made three elemental punctuation errors (two missing commas, one missing apostrophe; I am not telling you more than that) and gotten the name of her own department wrong—this from a person whose job is to promote education. In a similar spirit, I received a letter not long ago from a pediatric surgeon inviting me to speak at a conference. The writer used the word “children’s” twice in her invitation, spelling it two different ways and getting it wrong both times. This was a children’s specialist working in a children’s hospital. How long do you have to be exposed to a word, how central must it be to your working life, to notice how it is spelled?

But answers to questions this large and complex must be given the space of days and time to unfold themselves. By scrawling your own punctuation, forcing by suicide to turn the question mark into a period, you close out a sentence that still contains all the potential elements of a good story. You shut the book before it's had a chance to show you where God is going with all this background material.

Harry has kissed Craig so many times, but this is different from all of the kisses that have come before. At first there were the excited dating kisses, the kisses used to punctuate their liking of each other, the kisses that were both proof and engine of their desire. Then the more serious kisses, the it’s-getting-serious kisses, followed by the relationship kisses—that variety pack, sometimes intense, sometimes resigned, sometimes playful, sometimes confused. Kisses that led to making out and kisses that led to saying goodbye. Kisses to mark territory, kisses meant only for private, kisses that lasted hours and kisses that were gone before they’d arrived. Kisses that said, I know you. Kisses that pleaded, Come back to me. Kisses that knew they weren’t working. Or at least Harry’s kisses knew they weren’t working. Craig’s kisses still believed. So the kissing had to stop.

I startle, breathing faster, grateful he can only sense the general direction of my feelings and not more than that. For a moment I actually want to say no. No, I’m not scared. I’m petrified. Because being this close to you is doing things to me. Strange things and irrational things and things that flutter against my chest and braid my bones together. I want a pocketful of punctuation marks to end the thoughts he’s forced into my head. But I don’t say any of those things. Instead, I ask a question I already know the answer to. “Why would I be scared?” “You’re shaking,” he says. “Oh.” The two letters and their small, startled sound run right out of my mouth to seek refuge in a place far from here. I keep wishing I had the strength to look away from him in moments like this. I keep wishing my cheeks wouldn’t so easily enflame. I keep wasting my wishes on stupid things, I think.

E.M. Ashford: And death shall be no more" comma "death, thou shalt die." Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting. E.M. Ashford: Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored Death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause. E.M. Ashford: In this way, the uncompromising way one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, soul, God, past present. Not insuperable barriers. Not semi-colons. Just a comma.

How boundless is the horoscope of spring! One can read it in a thousand different ways, interpret it blindly, spell it out at will, happy to be able to decipher anything at all amid the misleading divinations of birds. The text can be read forward or backward, lose its sense and find it again in many versions, in a thousand alternatives. Because the text of spring is marked by hints, ellipses, lines dotted on an empty azure, and because the gaps between the syllables are filled by the frivolous guesses and surmises of birds, my story, like that text, will follow many different tracks and will be punctuated by springlike dashes, sighs, and dots.

The properties that define a group are: 1. Closure. The offspring of any two members combined by the operation must itself be a member. In the group of integers, the sum of any two integers is also an integer (e.g., 3 + 5 = 8). 2. Associativity. The operation must be associative-when combining (by the operation) three ordered members, you may combine any two of them first, and the result is the same, unaffected by the way they are bracketed. Addition, for instance, is associative: (5 + 7) + 13 = 25 and 5 + (7 + 13) = 25, where the parentheses, the "punctuation marks" of mathematics, indicate which pair you add first. 3. Identity element. The group has to contain an identity element such that when combined with any member, it leaves the member unchanged. In the group of integers, the identity element is the number zero. For example, 0 + 3 = 3 + 0 = 3. 4. Inverse. For every member in the group there must exist an inverse. When a member is combined with its inverse, it gives the identity element. For the integers, the inverse of any number is the number of the same absolute value, but with the opposite sign: e.g., the inverse of 4 is -4 and the inverse of -4 is 4; 4 + (-4) = 0 and (-4) + 4 = 0. The fact that this simple definition can lead to a theory that embraces and unifies all the symmetries of our world continues to amaze even mathematicians.

I still felt a little bit sick for needing the help of a Librarian. It was frustrating. Terribly frustrating. In fact, I don’t think I can accurately—through text—show you just how frustrating it was. But because I love you, I’m going to try anyway. Let’s start by randomly capitalizing letters. “We cAn SenD fOr a draGOn to cArry us,” SinG saId As we burst oUt oF the stAirWeLL and ruSHED tHrough ThE roOm aBovE. “ThAT wILl taKe tOO Long,” BaStiLlE saiD. “We’Ll haVe To graB a VeHiCle oFf thE STrEet,” I sAid. (You know what, that’s not nearly frustrating enough. I’m going to have to start adding in random punctuation marks too.) We c! RoS-Sed thrOu? gH t% he Gra## ND e ` nt < Ry > WaY at “A” de-aD Ru) n. OnC $ e oUts/ iDE, I Co* Uld sEe T ^ haT the suN wa + S nEar to s = Ett = ING—it w.O.u.l.d Onl > y bE a co@ uPle of HoU[ rs unTi ^ L the tR} e} atY RATiF ~ iCATiON ha, pPenEd. We nEeDeD!! to bE QuicK?.? UnFOrTu() nAtelY, tHE! re weRe no C? arriA-ges on tHe rOa ^ D for U/ s to cOmMan > < dEer. Not a ON ~ e ~. THerE w + eRe pe/\ Ople wa | lK | Ing aBoUt, BU? t no caRr# iaGes. (Okay, you know what? That’s not frustrating enough either. Let’s start replacing some random vowels with the letter Q.) I lqOk-eD arO! qnD, dE# sPqrA# te, fRq? sTr/ Ated (like you, hopefully), anD aNn | qYeD. Jq! St eaR& lIer, tHqr ^ E hq.d BeeN DoZen! S of cq? RrIqgEs on The rQA! d! No-W tHqRe wA = Sn’t a SqnGl + e oN ^ q. “ThE_rQ!” I eXclai $ mqd, poIntIng. Mqv = Ing do ~ Wn th_e RqaD! a shoRt diStq + + nCe aWay < wAs > a sTrANgq gLaSs cqnTrAPtion. I waSN’t CqrTain What it wAs >, bUt It w! qs MoV? ing—aND s% qmewhat quIc: =) Kly. “LeT’s G_q gRA? b iT!

At first there were the excited dating kisses, the kisses used to punctuate their liking of each other, the kisses that were both proof and engine of their desire. Then the more serious kisses, the it’s-getting-serious kisses, followed by the relationship kisses—that variety pack, sometimes intense, sometimes resigned, sometimes playful, sometimes confused. Kisses that led to making out and kisses that led to saying goodbye. Kisses to mark territory, kisses meant only for private, kisses that lasted hours and kisses that were gone before they’d arrived. Kisses that said, I know you. Kisses that pleaded, Come back to me. Kisses that knew they weren’t working. Or at least Harry’s kisses knew they weren’t working. Craig’s kisses still believed. So the kissing had to stop. Harry had to tell Craig. And it was bad, but not as bad as he feared.

So Marxism, for all its plurality, has been marked by the interplay of theoretical and political preoccupations. It has also been punctuated by widely perceived moments of internal crisis – starting in the late 1890s with the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Preconditions of Socialism, but again during the First World War, in the 1930s, and at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, one of us has written, “Marxism is constitutively, from Marx’s contribution onwards, . . . crisis theory” (Kouvelakis 2005, 25). Perhaps there are two main reasons for this succession of crises. First, Marxism is inherently tied to capitalism, at once the object of the critique of political economy and an enemy to be vanquished. But since, as Marx and Engels showed in the Communist Manifesto, it is also a dynamic system constantly transforming itself, Marxism constantly falls victim to the anxiety that it is not adequate to its Protean antagonist, that it must run to keep up with the metamorphoses of bourgeois society. This is then connected to a second source of anxiety, namely that capitalism continues to exist, and that therefore the communist project remains unrealized, two centuries now after Marx’s birth.

Hope. It’s like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It’s fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence.

But before the man could reach the door, there was a knock, like one that happens to precipitate a courtship meeting for two punctuation marks that are going out to dinner and one really doesn’t like the restaurant, but goes anyway because they’re a comma dating.

The question mark, used well, may be the most profoundly human form of punctuation. Unlike the other marks, the question mark—except perhaps when used in a rhetorical question—imagines the Other. It envisions communication not as assertive but as interactive, even conversational.

Judd kissed him like it was the punctuation mark at the end of a sentence - a purposeful pause in time and breath. Contemplative and thorough. It had been a really good kiss.

Use exclamation points sparingly, you don’t want to give someone a heart attack!

Sometimes what separates the truth from one another is simply a question mark…

He still read—Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron, Milton, Whitman—not from physical books, as they were banned, but from the lines etched into his memory, which he could retrieve, in meditation, accurate to the last punctuation mark.

He paused to kiss me and I think he meant it as a dash or an ellipsis or some other temporary punctuation, but I pressed up on my toes and made it an exclamation point.

Certain things had to be done in certain ways to mark the end of the cycle of events; like secular voodoo, it helped to resolve matters, signifying and punctuating.

Computers can use combinations of bits to represent anything; the number of bits depends on the number of messages that need to be distinguished. Imagine, for example, a computer that works with the letters of the alphabet. Five-bit input signals can represent thirty-two different possibilities (25 = 32). Functions within the computer that work on letters sometimes use such a code, although they more often use an encoding with seven or eight bits, to allow representation of capitals, punctuation marks, numerals, and so on. Most modern computers use the standard representation of alphabet letters called ASCII (an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange). In ASCII, the sequence 1000001 represents the capital letter A, and 1000010 represents the capital B, and so on. The convention, of course, is arbitrary.

Right! Yes!” I take one of those deep breaths Daphne suggested because I’m speaking like I’ve mainlined cocaine after drinking seventeen Red Bulls and everything I say is punctuated with an exclamation mark. “Calming myself before I get more excited,” I mutter as I open the flaps. That calm lasts about a quarter of a second and then I’m back to excited freak-out.

Every belief, every word, every phrase, every observation, every proposition, every citation, every punctuation mark is subjected to ruthless doubt and viscious interrogation. The conventions of grammar oblige me to end most of these sentences with periods, but there are ghostly, invisible lines curling and hovering over most of these tiny dots. What I mean is that most of the periods in this book are interrogation marks in disguise. Most of these declarations are really restless questions underneath.

It seemed a good idea, for example, when nothing much was really going on, for Booboolings to be beneficially excited by minimal stimuli, such as idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and eight or so punctuation marks, or dabs of pigment on flat surfaces in frames.

Time can stutter, it can drag, crawl, run, race, and, on occasion, fly. But its favourite form of locomotion has always been to skip. Few lives are lived without the punctuation of moments when we realise with sudden shock that a year, two years, maybe two dozen, have got behind us, sneaking by without permission and propelling us into a future we hardly imagined. From the River to the Sea, by Mercury Wells

The amazing thing about books is how they have lives of their own. Writers think they know their business when they sit down to compose a new work, and I suppose they do, right up to the moment when the last piece of punctuation gets planted on the final sentence. More often than not, that punctuation is a period. It should be a question mark, though, because what occurs from then on is anybody's guess.

This is a wake up call. Don’t press the snooze alarm. The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court-ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with their god’s anointed. Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe a god’s finger was on their trigger. Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare. One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a fancy word for biblical interpretation. When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like ‘eupraxophy.’ Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases—those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god—tend to share certain operational assumptions. These include the belief that: (1) Every word of the Bible is true. (2) The English translation of the Bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture. This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks. (3) The Bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality. (4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles. (5) The Bible is without error. (6) No part of the Bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part. (7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the Bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict. The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the ‘Word of God’ (the Bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called prophecy), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality. The Bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.

Hope. It's like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It's fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. And it's the only thing in the world keeping me afloat.

All of life is lived in between ellipses. We’re all uniquely shaped punctuation marks to the epic God is writing in the history of mankind.

Except it wasn’t the end at all. It was the first letter, the first word, the first sentence with no punctuation mark in sight. It was a beautiful, messy beginning, an honest truth written in script, in a handwriting with loops and curves only we could decipher. It was real. It was painful. It was healing. And most of all, it was ours.

Dying isn't the important thing. It's nothing more than the punctuation mark at the end of your life. It's everything that came before that matters. Punctuation marks, most people just skip right over them. They don't even have a sound.

My family had written stories about places in ranch history. We used the slanting penmanship of fence lines scribbling their way across dunes, the sweeping cursive of cut hay in the meadow below the barn, and the well-placed punctuation of windmills and water holes over the range.

There are instances in which it might seem more appropriate or accurate to include an exclamation point with a question mark. This has given rise to a unique punctuation mark known as the “interrobang” (

I want a pocketful of punctuation marks to end the thoughts he's forced into my head.

Translating punctuation from the Hebrew Bible is a problem, since ancient Hebrew has no periods, commas, semicolons, colons, exclamation marks, question marks, or quotation marks. The King James Bible, on the other hand, has a lot of punctuation. It affects tense, sound, and sense, but it also makes everything read slower. Way slower. With a period at the end of the sentence, God is definitely done with creation, instead of breathlessly rushing on and possibly still continuing. Staring at that period, I realize that my reading is stalling for an obvious reason: the King James Version is taking me longer to read because it is longer.

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.

When I was a kid, I had a semi-feral tomcat that was fond of leaving animal carcasses on our front step. He was huge and grey and had long, matted fur. I’d be on my way to school and open the door to find him waiting, a bird or a squirrel or a small rabbit—often headless, by this time—in his mouth or at his feet, a look of self-satisfied pride in his eyes. One morning, I found him with the carcass of a raccoon not much smaller than he was. The cat didn’t look much better than the raccoon. His ear was torn and bleeding, and patches of fur were missing from all over his body, which was punctuated by scratches and tooth marks. I vaguely remember him missing a tooth, too. But that same dark look of pride was in his eyes. I imagined what led to that scene, something akin to a bar fight gone horribly wrong, leading him to come to his friend in the early dawn and ask for help burying the body. I got a shovel and we got rid of the raccoon together.

A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize thirty lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Every single kid got every single line correct, down to the punctuation marks. Seeing them write out the exercise in class, she said, was a thing of wonder, like watching Thoroughbreds circle a track.

Humankind’s pathetic life supplies the poetry of our existence. Just as without tragedy comedy would lose its magical qualities, life without pain and absent knowledge of the inevitability of our death would result in our brief existence devoid of any note of sincerity and our lives ending without an apt punctuation mark.

War is a red haze punctuated by horror and death. It's a sequence of things that no human should ever have to know are possible, let alone see or have happen to them. War is neither a science or an art, it's a fucking mess, and the only sane response to it is to run fast in the opposite direction.

heart thumped painfully against her ribs. “Will you come to Paris with me?” That wasn’t what she’d wanted to ask, but it was close. Elijah’s expression didn’t change. “Paris stinks, it’s full of Frenchmen, and they have addled notions of chivalry. Why do you want to go to Paris, Genevieve?” He hadn’t said no. Jenny clung to that and to his hand. “I don’t want to go to Paris, and I’m not sure I ever did. I don’t want to go anywhere that means I can’t be with you.” “Do you want a travel companion, Genevieve? If that’s what you’re asking, then I must refuse the honor.” Pain threatened to buckle Jenny’s knees. “Not a travel companion. Not just that.” “Somebody to paint with and appreciate art?” “Not that either.” Because she would set aside her artistic aspirations happily in favor of creating a life with him. “Good, because as much as I admire your talent and dedication, as much as I would enjoy seeing all the great capitals and treasures of the Continent—of the world—with you, I would decline that invitation too.” It dawned on Jenny that he wanted her to ask a different question. “What invitation would you accept? Tell me, Elijah, and I will extend it.” He took a step closer. “You already have. You have invited me to love you, and I do, Genevieve. I love your heart, I love your gentleness and determination, I love your concern for all around you, and I love your kisses.” He kissed her, a quick punctuation mark at the end of a lovely little list. “But you won’t travel with me?” “I’ve seen the wonders of the Continent, Genevieve. Stared at them for so long I was blind to much else, such as the wonders of a loving family and a welcoming home. Marry me, and I will happily explore those more impressive wonders with you, regardless of what country we find ourselves in.” Marry me. The question she hadn’t known how to ask him. Jenny bundled into Elijah’s arms. “Yes. Yes to the family and the home, yes to becoming your wife. Nothing would make me happier.” In

Will you come to Paris with me?” That wasn’t what she’d wanted to ask, but it was close. Elijah’s expression didn’t change. “Paris stinks, it’s full of Frenchmen, and they have addled notions of chivalry. Why do you want to go to Paris, Genevieve?” He hadn’t said no. Jenny clung to that and to his hand. “I don’t want to go to Paris, and I’m not sure I ever did. I don’t want to go anywhere that means I can’t be with you.” “Do you want a travel companion, Genevieve? If that’s what you’re asking, then I must refuse the honor.” Pain threatened to buckle Jenny’s knees. “Not a travel companion. Not just that.” “Somebody to paint with and appreciate art?” “Not that either.” Because she would set aside her artistic aspirations happily in favor of creating a life with him. “Good, because as much as I admire your talent and dedication, as much as I would enjoy seeing all the great capitals and treasures of the Continent—of the world—with you, I would decline that invitation too.” It dawned on Jenny that he wanted her to ask a different question. “What invitation would you accept? Tell me, Elijah, and I will extend it.” He took a step closer. “You already have. You have invited me to love you, and I do, Genevieve. I love your heart, I love your gentleness and determination, I love your concern for all around you, and I love your kisses.” He kissed her, a quick punctuation mark at the end of a lovely little list. “But you won’t travel with me?” “I’ve seen the wonders of the Continent, Genevieve. Stared at them for so long I was blind to much else, such as the wonders of a loving family and a welcoming home. Marry me, and I will happily explore those more impressive wonders with you, regardless of what country we find ourselves in.” Marry me. The question she hadn’t known how to ask him. Jenny bundled into Elijah’s arms. “Yes. Yes to the family and the home, yes to becoming your wife. Nothing would make me happier.” In

Through the open doorway I heard the warm, bustling sounds of a busy inn: the low murmur of conversation, punctuated with laughter, the bright clink of bottle glass, and the dull thump of wooden tankards on tabletops. And, threading gently through it all, a lute played in the background. It was faint, almost drowned by the other noise, but I heard it the same way a mother can mark her child crying from a dozen rooms away. the music was like a memory of family, of friendship and warm belonging. It made my gut twist and my teeth ache. For a moment my hands stopped aching from the cold, and instead longed for the familiar feel of music running through them.

He stood in the doorway of her office. He was, as always, the consummate scoundrel. He leaned against the doorframe, smiling—almost smirking—at her, as if he knew how rapidly her heart had started beating. If that was how they were going to do this… She simply raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Oh,” she said with a sniff. “It’s you.” “You’re not fooling anyone,” he said. She could feel the corner of her mouth twitch up. Last time she’d seen him, he’d kissed her so thoroughly she had not yet recovered. “I’m not?” “I heard it most distinctly,” he told her. “You might have said ‘It’s you,’ but there was a distinct exclamation mark at the end. In fact, I think there were two.” “Oh, dear.” Free looked down, fluttering her eyelashes demurely. “Is my punctuation showing once more?” His eyes darkened and he took a step into her office. “Don’t hide it on my account,” he growled. “You have the most damnably beautiful punctuation that I have ever seen.

The punctuation mark that best describes me as a person is the dash. But for Mark Question, it would probably be the question mark. Or better yet, is there a punctuation mark shaped like a dick?


So, we’re looking for a language resembling Arabic. How many letters does Arabic have?” “Twenty-eight, if I’m not mistaken. But, look, there could be diacritical marks and punctuation marks as well. If we include those, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say the 34 that you say is the highest expression of the blocks Raj has done so far…” “Represents an alphabet that we can eventually understand, at least phonetically,

Q: What is the world’s longest punctuation mark? A: The hundred yard dash.

Well, for one thing," she said, "her knowledge of punctuation begins and ends with her own beauty mark.

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas—abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken—and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, talks of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created. —Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

we need to know culturally what Paul knew – some letters he was writing to Jews, and others to former Gentiles – and there are hints in the epistles if one knows what to look for.  But assumption and an ill-knowledge of first century history has really kept us at a disadvantage.  Paul writes as a first century Jew.  He was well versed in the laws of God and the laws of the Jews, he expertly writes in allusions and metaphor, he takes this and that from the scripture and links them together in a markedly rabbinical way, not in a Christian way.  He uses Hebraic rules of interpretation to open up the scriptures in order to show that Jesus is the Messiah – and unfortunately, he isn’t usually very clear about it.  And the fact that ancient Greek had no punctuation, and only one word for law (when many types of laws are referred to) – well, it really doesn’t assist him in being crystal clear to us, let alone his own contemporaries.

Punctuation marks are like road signs; without them we just may get lost...

War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Unknown

The quotation marks and other punctuation suggested that it had originally been composed in the nerd-friendly text processing program Emacs.

Women, Rock the Vote! Women Rock the vote! No matter how you read it... we will, we do!

Hope. It's like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It's a fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence.

In The Success System That Never Fails, W. Clement Stone advises that to sound enthusiastic you must act enthusiastic. If you act enthusiastic your emotions will follow and soon enough you will feel enthusiastic. He offers the following specific advice from his own experience: Talk loudly! This is particularly helpful if you are emotionally upset or if you have “butterflies in your stomach” when you stand before an audience. Talk rapidly! Your mind functions more quickly than you do. Emphasize! Stress words that are important to you or your listeners—a word like you, for example. Hesitate! Talk rapidly, but hesitate where there would be a period, comma, or other punctuation mark in the written words. When you employ the dramatic effect of silence, the mind of the person who is listening catches up with the thoughts you have expressed. Hesitation after a word you wish to emphasize accentuates the emphasis. Keep a smile in your voice! This eliminates gruffness as you talk loudly and rapidly. You can put a smile in your voice by putting a smile on your face, a smile in your eyes. Modulate! This is important if you are speaking for a long period. Remember, you can modulate both pitch and volume. You can speak loudly, but intermittently change to a conversational tone and a lower pitch if you wish. [This is the end of the excerpt from The Success System That Never Fails. The following resumes from How to Sell Your Way Through Life.]

One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words. This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text.

The 1935 Philippine Constitution, with 7,828 words and punctuation marks, was finished in nine months; the 1973 Constitution, consisting of 13,671 words and punctuation marks, was deliberated in a span of two years. The Aquino Constitution, by comparison, was completed in a record time of only four months.

Hakardly had studied the Lore of magic for years and, because magic always tends to be a two-way process, it had made its mark on him; he gave the impression of being as fragile as a cheese straw, and in some unaccountable way the dryness of his endeavours had left him with the ability to pronounce punctuation.

Of all the punctuation marks, he told me, ellipses were his favorite.

I want to have a punctuation mark on my face. I’d like to shape my mustache into a tilde sign.

It then progresses onto more challenging and commonly misused marks, like commas, apostrophes, hyphens, dashes, and parentheses.

I don’t think of these as simple punctuation marks anymore; I recognize the inherent bias in certain uses of punctuation.”~ Kavita Das

From his headquarters in Los Angeles, Bob Lorsch had entered the prepaid calling card space and built SmarTalk into a success. I was a VP at Salomon at the time and had heard stories about how crazy and fascinating Lorsch was, so I agreed to work with my colleague Mark Davis on a SmarTalk equity offering a year or so after the company’s IPO. We met at their Los Angeles offices at lunchtime. Lorsch burst into the room like a bad caricature of Danny DeVito, and even though I’d been warned that he was an unconventional CEO, I still wasn’t prepared for the encounter. We had put together the standard detailed presentation that analyzed the state of the public equity markets, how the SmarTalk stock had been performing, who owned it, et cetera. A young Salomon analyst who had been pulling all-nighters to assemble the books sat in a chair near the door. Mark and I passed around the presentation books. “So we’ve prepared a—” I started. “Just tell me,” Lorsch interjected. “Do we have Grubman or not?” Jack Grubman, Salomon’s famed equity analyst, had previously endorsed the SmarTalk IPO with a buy rating. “Yes,” Mark said. “We have Jack. We talked to him prior to the meeting and confirmed that he’ll continue to cover the company and support the offering.” “Then you’re hired,” Lorsch said with a smile, pushing his unopened book to the center of the table. “Let’s eat.” It seemed reckless to have made his decision on so little information, and I could only imagine how the analyst kid near the door felt, sleep-deprived and probably proud of his hard work, only to see the book tossed aside without so much as a cracking of the spine. While we ate the catered lunch that was delivered to the conference room, Mark mentioned that I was in the midst of planning my wedding for that summer. “Don’t get married!” Lorsch advised me. “Terrible, terrible idea.” He described a few of his own ill-fated unions, dropping in crude one-liners to punctuate the stories: “Why buy when you can rent? . . . If it flies, floats, or fucks, don’t buy it! . . .” Despite

Aurora can’t talk to you right now.” “Why not?” “Do you know what a period is?” “A punctuation mark. I am Italian, not illiterate.” “Not that kind of period. A girl’s kind of period.” “Oh, a female’s menstrual cycle.” “Yes. She’s in the throes of it right now.” “She seemed in fine health earlier.” “What are you, her OB?” “Her what?” “Exactly.” “See? He doesn’t have a clue.

Rumors of the footnote’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Both marks were formed by single pen-strokes named virgulae, the diminutive of the Latin virga for "rod" or "staff", or even, in medieval slang, "penis".

(Extinctions are the) rare and unpredictable punctuation marks in the run-on sentence of life.

Yes, a meaningful casual encounter can really enrich life. It is one of life’s special punctuation marks. One should cherish these liaisons as much as any committed relationship they may counterpoint. If they are set against an austere, solitary canvas, their light shines ever brighter.

In the cinema and games that formed the basis of Prax's understanding of how people of violence interacted, the cocking of a gun was less a threat than a kind of punctuation mark. A security agent questioning someone might begin with threats and slaps, but when he cocked his gun, that meant it was time to take him seriously. It wasn't something Prax had considered any more carefully than which urinal to use when he wasn't the only one in the men's room or how to step on and off the transport tube. It was the untaught etiquette of received wisdom. You yelled, you threatened, you cocked your gun, and then people talked.

The Comma: The office of the Comma is to show the slightest separation which calls for punctuation at all. It should be omitted whenever possible. It is used to mark the least divisions of a sentence.

The Punctuation of Wisdom [10w] It is wiser to live by question-marks than by periods.

If two or more clauses grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon.

It took all of us," they admitted in unison. "Except me," said Dennis. "But I was decapitated." "You do mean incapacitated, I hope," Mother said. "How were you boys planning to spend summer vacation?" she added. The boys exchanged glances of dismay. Dennis pretended to go back to sleep. "Earning money to pay for the damage?" Jeremy guessed. "Close," said Mother. Briefly, the boys had hope. "Now re-punctuate that sentence with a period instead of a question mark and you'll be exactly right.

People just can’t help themselves when it comes to quotation marks. As if they’re completely paralyzed by this particular punctuation. I guess it’s really not that big of a deal, but it does seem to be a widespread brand of easily avoidable buffoonery.

Separating words with blank space, and using punctuation marks and colored inks and upper- and lowercase letters to make easier sense of the words on the page—all these date from the time of Charlemagne (c. 747–814). Not until then was writing organized into sentences and paragraphs, with a capital at the beginning of each sentence and a full stop at the end. Books without spaces and punctuation look utterly forbidding. An example is the Vergilius Sangallensis, the Virgil manuscript in the abbey library of St. Gall. Produced in Rome late in the fourth or early in the fifth century, the manuscript was written from start to finish in capital letters without breaks or punctuation: one very long capitalized word that is exhausting for our modern eyes to read.

(I long for someone to invent a punctuation mark for despondency…)

Contamination from plastic pollution is a terrestrial problem as much as it is a marine problem. Humans have altered the earth with roads, mines, buildings, ditches, dams, and dumps to the degree that our era deserves a name--the Anthropocene. Natural history is punctuated by changes in life, due either to rapid evolution or catastrophic extinction, and evidence of change is sometimes marked by well-preserved, widely distributed fossils. What is our fossil equivalent? Some suggest it's black carbon from the Industrial Revolution, which shows up in the seafloor and ice caps, or it's radioactive isotopes from the mid-twentieth-century nuclear tests. Now, with evidence of plastic, transported by wind and waves, blanketing Earth from the seafloor to the tops of mountains, it is arguable that plastic is the best index fossil that represents us. Even if we stop polluting the planet with plastic today, we will have to live with a layer of microplastics that will represent this moment in natural history, when a single species so deeply affected the planet for a short while.

Cigarettes are the punctuation marks of life. Now I live without punctuation, without rhythm. My life is a stupid avant-garde poem. I live without cigarettes to mark a question. Without cigarettes that end as we get happily or dangerously close to an answer. Or to the absence of one. Exclamation cigarettes. Ellipsis cigarettes. I would like to smoke with the elegance of a semicolon.

The book is written by “Lord Timothy Dexter, First in the East, First in the West, and the Greatest Philosopher in the Western World.” If you ever write a memoir, please make up a fun little egotistical description of yourself for your title page. Be bold about it. The book details Timothy’s life in his own somewhat incoherent way. It was written entirely without punctuation. When it was pointed out that the greatest philosopher in the Western world would probably use at least some punctuation (since it was, thank God, no longer the sixteenth century), in the second edition (there were ultimately eight printings) Dexter added a page of punctuation at the end, so readers could insert the marks wherever they liked or, as he claimed, “I put in A Nuf here and they may pepper and salt it as they plese.” If I was really committed to following Dexter’s teaching, I’d have written this chapter without punctuation and just presented you with this page.

I'm not an invalid by a long shot, and I am physically capable in every conceivable way, but our lives are routinely punctuated by periods of complete misery that carry a dramatic impact. These conditions have redefined the meaning of love, affection, and commitment for both of us virtually overnight. They have propelled us into a relationship more often seen at age seventy than forty.... The same prescription we've tried to employ for eighteen years seems to apply: communicate, and if you must fight, fight fair and be gracious when you make up.

crushing sense of finality swept over me. The seven of us sat quietly in a stillness that felt like a punctuation mark. It may not have been the end of the story, but it was definitely the end of a chapter.

Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.

Within minutes, I received a response with punctuation I had never seen before. “Hello (((Weisman))),” wrote “CyberTrump.” Nothing more. Just that. I was sitting at my desk at work. I had some time on my hands as an editor at the Times, since my responsibilities then centered on domestic policy—economics, the environment, poverty—and with the nation consumed in this strange presidential campaign, not a lot of policy making was going on. “Care to explain?” I answered, intuiting that my last name in those triple parentheses must somehow denote my Jewish faith. “What, ho, the vaunted Ashkenazi intelligence, hahaha!” “CyberTrump” came back. “It’s a dog whistle, fool. Belling the cat for my fellow goyim.” With the cat belled, the horde followed. What I didn’t know was that I had unwittingly exposed what was known in the alt-right as “echoes,” those three parentheses that practitioners of online harassment wrapped around Jewish-sounding names on social media. Unbeknown to, well, just about everyone, alt-right anti-Semites had created a Google plug-in that could be used to search double or triple parentheses, since ordinary search engines do not pick up punctuation marks. Haters would slap these “echoes” around Jewish-sounding names of people online they wanted to target. Once a target was “belled,” the alt-right anti-Semitic mob could download the innocuous-sounding Coincidence Detector plug-in from the Google Chrome store, track down targets like heat-seeking missiles, then swarm. “You’ve all provoked us. You’ve been doing it for decades—and centuries even—and we’ve finally had enough,” declared Andrew Anglin, the creator and mastermind of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. “Challenge has been accepted.” And swarm they did.

you need fourteen characters, minimum. Use random letters, not words. Here’s a tip: think of a sentence, and use the first letter in each of those words. Mix it up between upper and lower case. Then pick two numbers that mean something to you—not dates—and stick them somewhere between the letters. Put a punctuation mark at the beginning of the password and then a symbol, like a dollar sign, at the end.

These small surprises can do a lot to break the monotony of everyday routines. A few months ago I realized that though I loved our white dinnerware, I was getting a bit bored with it. But rather than consider buying a new set, I ordered two extra pink plates in each size. The pink dishes make the whole stack of plates seem more appealing, and when laid out on the table for a dinner party, they’re like joyful punctuation marks. Similarly, the “accent nail” trend, which involves painting the thumb or ring fingernail in an atypical color like lemon yellow or turquoise, offers a simple way to make a manicure special.

Punctuation marks are well-mannered symbols that lead us around like a faithful butler; remove them, and we dance free form ...

In America, they use exclamation marks to make everything terrific, in France to make everything terrible, but here in England we don't use them at all.