Semicolon Inside Quotes

Jackson turned his left hand up and gazed down at the simple black tattoo on the inside of his wrist. He was silent for a long time, then looked up and met my eyes. He said, "You're an avid reader. You know the meaning of semicolon." I frowned. "It's when the author could have ended a sentence but chose not to." "Exactly." "I don't understand." Jackson looked deep into my eyes. His smile might have been the saddest thing I'd ever seen. He said softly, "I'm the author, and the sentence is my life.

She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There was an operation, she'd been told. They took half your stomach out and fitted you up with a plastic bag. Better a semicolon than a full stop, some might say.

It’s been said that inside every life is a fascinating book, or at least a chapter. Wrong. Some people don’t have a freakin’ semicolon, like that woman in Delray who blogs everything her cat does, and her cat even has a blog and every word is meow. But you have to play the hand you’re dealt, and I can’t exactly stand on street corners with a megaphone sharing Big Answers on Everything. That was my first choice, but a monkey wrench hit the works: a few itsy-bitsy little incidents.

There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive. And yet I’ve come to believe, and in rare moments can almost feel, that like an illness some vestige of which the body keeps to protect itself, pain may be its own reprieve; that the violence that is latent within us may be, if never altogether dispelled or tamed, at least acknowledged, defined, and perhaps by dint of the love we feel for our lives, for the people in them and for our work, rendered into an energy that need not be inflicted on others or ourselves, an energy we may even be able to use; and that for those of us who have gone to war with our own minds there is yet hope for what Freud called ‘normal unhappiness,’ wherein we might remember the dead without being haunted by them, give to our lives a coherence that is not ‘closure,’ and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves amid a truce that is not peace.