Semicolon Quotes

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding. For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding. We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding. If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.

When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

Nora— Forgive me for copyediting, but it must be said—you have raped the semicolon yet again. Stop it. It wasn’t asking for it no matter how it was dressed. If you don’t know how to use punctuation then do away with it altogether, write like Faulkner and we’ll pretend it’s on purpose.” Bite me, Easton, Nora said to herself as she corrected her sexually compromised semicolon in chapter eighteen. Seriously, bite me.

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?

My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Multiple times he has tried writing his thoughts about Marianne down on paper in an effort to make sense of them. He's moved by a desire to describe in words exactly how she looks and speaks. Her hair and clothing. The copy of Swann's Way she reads at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, with a dark French painting on the cover and a mint-coloured spine. Her long fingers turning the pages. She's not leading the same kind of life as other people. She acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then she can be so naive. He wants to understand how her mind works... He writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review.

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.

How hideous is the semicolon.

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.

Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well.

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

I comma square bracket recruit's name square bracket comma do solemnly swear by square bracket recruit's deity of choice square bracket to uphold the Laws and Ordinances of the City of Ankh-Morpork comma serve the public truƒt comma and defend the ƒubjects of his ƒtroke her bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket Majeƒty bracket name of reigning monarch bracket without fear comma favour comma or thought of perƒonal ƒafety semi-colon to purƒue evildoers and protect the innocent comma comma laying down my life if neceƒsary in the cauƒe of said duty comma so help me bracket aforeƒaid deity bracket full stop Gods Save the King stroke Queen bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket full stop.

I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to become a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

A semicolon is where a writer can choose to end the sentence,” she said, tucking a lock of brown hair behind her ear. “But they don’t. The story goes on. It’s a symbol of hope. To keep going.” She smiled tremulously. “Sometimes I need that reminder.

Semicolon, you dolt!

He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James. "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

Was that semi-colon some kind of flirty wink or just bad punctuation?

God is not an exclamation point. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called “human grace.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of this.

Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index.

the truth is loving someone isn't a period it's a semicolon and the choice you make is what comes on the other side

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

Stay Strong. Love endlessly. Change Lives.

Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism...inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)....And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.

The one critisism the author of Slaugherhouse-Five would make of the young writer was what he called a punctuation problem. Mr. Vonnegut didn't like all the semicolons. 'People will probably figure out that you went to college -- you don't have to try to prove it to them,' he told Danny.

Lust fades after climax, love lasts until breakfast!

semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends.

Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years. As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms: * Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. * Don't use no double negatives. * Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't. * Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed. * Do not put statements in the negative form. * Verbs has to agree with their subjects. * No sentence fragments. * Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. * Avoid commas, that are not necessary. * If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. * A writer must not shift your point of view. * Eschew dialect, irregardless. * And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. * Don't overuse exclamation marks!!! * Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. * Writers should always hyphenate between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyph-ens. * Write all adverbial forms correct. * Don't use contractions in formal writing. * Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. * It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms. * If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. * Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language. * Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors. * Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. * Never, ever use repetitive redundancies. * Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. * If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole. * Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration. * Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. * Always pick on the correct idiom. * "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'" * The adverb always follows the verb. * Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives." (New York Times, November 4, 1979; later also published in book form)

Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.

I remember the rule for semicolons; the sentences on both sides have to be full ones.

In our world," Darija said, throwing aside the chapter she was marking up, "there will be no semicolons.

He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James. "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parenthesis," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.” And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. Just about the time they finally started inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven’t done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything.

I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Reagan Declares Firmness on Gulf; Plans are Unclear Isn't that classic? I don't mean the semicolon; I mean, isn't that just what the world needs? Unclear firmness! That is typical American policy: don't be clear, but be firm!

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.

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.

I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, “I should have used fewer semicolons” – and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their deathbed, I shall certainly save it up for my own.

i will rise from the ashes stronger than before bolder & brand new - you will not be my demise

I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation – but for many it may be too late.

pretentious and over-active” semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought.

If colons and semicolons give themselves airs and graces, at least they also confer airs and graces that the language would be lost without.

What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world.

There's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon,

The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494

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

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college

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.

He writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review. Then he turns a new page in the notebook so he doesn't have to look at what he's done.

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.

I love you like a semicolon; a half-pause in a torrent of thought during which life stutters into being. I want to take you in the breathless spaces between ellipses where passion builds and shudders into a trailing afterthought.

The things I like best in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of the curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not.

The stops point out, with truth, the time of pause A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause. t ev'ry comma, stop while one you count; At semicolon, two is the amount; A colon doth require the time of three; The period four, as learned men agree.

In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical centre of the novel. By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post—I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she’s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semi-colon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.

What has that to do with Miss Brooke’s marrying him? She does not do it for my amusement.’ ‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James. ‘No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs Cadwallader.

The semi-colon is a burp, a hiccup. It's a drunk staggering out of the saloon at 2 a.m., grabbing your lapels on the way and asking you to listen to one more story.

Another day. How long are you gonna scroll down? Semicolon Smile

You didn’t put a semicolon there — God did.

I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, “I should have used fewer semicolons

He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James. "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James. “No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James. "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.

It´s not a start over." Brooke shook her head. It´s like yesterday was the semicolon of the sentence that is your life. There´s more to come after, though. Not an end. Not a beginning. It´s a pause, really.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.” ― A Man Without a Country

Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.” And

There's nothing sexier than imaging myself as an Oxford comma getting unambiguously banged. Throw in a semicolon in between two closely related independent clauses, and a volcanic love of punctuation eruption is guaranteed.

Writing is new, relatively speaking. Story telling is ancient. Tell your story first putting aside all other worries. Leave fretting over homonyms, semicolons, and Oxford commas to editors and friends you can be bribe with baking.

If a period is a stop sign, then what kind of traffic flow is created by other marks? The comma is a speed bump; the semicolon is what a driver education teacher calls a “rolling stop”; the parenthetical expression is a detour; the colon is a flashing yellow light that announces something important up ahead; the dash is a tree branch in the road.

the American essayist Lewis Thomas on the semicolon: The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added [ . . .] The period [or full stop] tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with the semicolon there you get a pleasant feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer. The Medusa and the Snail, 1979

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.

I was, a near grown man, sat in his dank, dark and rickety digs, feverishly hovering about the glare of a computer screen like a disorientated moth, one searching for a flaming light of recognition from someone/anyone!

I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again

He was impressed with his father's fiction and noticed certain stylistic tics that he shared, and figured it was genetic. Why would genes determine only physical traits, eye color and left-handedness? Why not other, more subtle, bodiless proclivities such as a love of the semicolon and a propensity to string modifying clauses ad infinitum?

a favourite master, Mr. Grove, liked to say that if we learned to master the semi-colon we could expect to be successful in whatever path we chose in life. One

(did anyone ever use a semi-colon in a suicide note?).

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

The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”.

Everything she said, he treated like it ended in a semicolon.

I was one of only two people on staff who knew how semicolons worked.

How come you never use semicolons?” she’ll say. Or: “How come you chop it all up into little sections instead of letting it flow and flow?” That sort of thing.

Well, I am more partial to a semicolon myself.

And another small point, or two actually; Aldus was the first to use the modern semicolon.

Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

The semicolon is unquestionably the ugliest piece of punctuation in the English language. It is neither full stop nor comma, and as such a mongrel construction.

Up until my last year in college, I didn't know what semicolons were for so I just didn't use them.

I remember the rule for semicolons; the sentences on both sides have to be full ones. Full people. Whole.

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

After four centuries, the semicolon has finally achieved it’s true calling: helping people wink online. :-)

He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James. “No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “Why

A month is too long to talk online. In the time we have been talking, my imagination has run wild. Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well.

Whether it’s the Manual that peers down from your bookshelf, or Strunk and White, or the APA style guide, or Fowler, or Lynne Truss, it’s fair to ask why we consider these books authoritative, and if there might not be some better way to assess our writing than through their dicta.

But after the war, when editors like Martin Durk came to prominence by trumpeting the timely death of the novel, Parish opted for a reflective silence. He stopped taking on projects and watched with quiet reserve as his authors died off one by one--at peace with the notion that he would join them soon enough in that circle of Elysium reserved for plot and substance and the judicious use of the semicolon.

For instance, the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender Le Pen make the loop-de-looping we call language. I mean writing. The point: I’d no sooner allow that fragment to sit there like a ripe zit if I was typing on a computer. And consequently, some important aspect of my thinking, particularly the breathlessness, the accruing syntax, the not quite articulate pleasure that evades or could give a fuck about the computer’s green corrective lines (how they injure us!) would be chiseled, likely with a semicolon and a proper predicate, into something correct, and, maybe, dull. To be sure, it would have less of the actual magic writing is, which comes from our bodies, which we actually think with, quiet as it’s kept.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber. Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything. Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

Words want to be sampled, relished, remembered; they need breathing space in the shape of commas, colons, semi-colons and full stops. Words are individual. They are content to string along together in sentences and paragraphs, but remain mavericks, outsiders beyond the crowd, the mob, the gang. A long novel begins with the first word.

In the long sentences of the president’s message, semicolons followed by “yet” or “but” separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt’s characteristic “on the one hand, on the other” style of crediting antagonistic views.

i thought grief would insert itself in the middle and never leave. i know better now. stanzas are for quitters punctuation is for the brave. If love is a semicolon then grief is a comma: it won't ever stand alone, but it will give you one breath, in.

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"]

In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Hilary Mantel reveals: “I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there’s no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.

But what ultimately made Yates the scourge of copy editors was his simple aversion to criticism; any emendation in his manuscript, be it a single semicolon, would cause dark alcoholic brooding, which would finally erupt in long, hectoring, semicoherent phone calls.

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.

What I want everyone to know is that the sun is going to rise tomorrow whether you want it to or not. Life is tragic, but it's also beautiful.

people with mental illness are human.

you came you conquered destroying everything - i lost a chunk of my soul that day

Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence— especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don’t mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that’s all.

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.

As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonisation, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they have no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semi-colon), the victimisation of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape.

There’s an extent to which your analysis of your own work is an interesting jumping-off point for criticism, but there’s equally an extent to which your writing is its own entity and exists independent of you and your intentions and your hopes and dreams.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding. For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding. We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.

If he silently decides not to say something when they’re talking, Marianne will ask ‘what?’ within one or two seconds. This ‘what?’ question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them. He writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review. Then he turns a new page in the notebook so he doesn’t have to look at what he’s done.

They don’t have to be sentences, they could be divided by commas, they could be divided by semi-colons; there’s a class of people who get very worked up about such things - they’re lonely people - they tend to have stains down the front of their shirts - they’ll tell you that dashes should be used only to subordinate complete sentences. You must forgive them.

Looking at the sky, he suddenly saw that it had become black. Then white again, but with great rippling circles. The circles were vultures wheeling around the sun. The vultures disappeared, to be replaced by checkers squares ready to be played on. On the board, the pieces moved around incredibly rapidly, winning dozens of games every minute. They were scarcely lined up before they started rushing at each other again, banging into each other, forming fighting combinations, wiping the other side out in the wink of an eye. Then the squares scattered, giving way to the grille of a crossword puzzle, and here, too, words flashed, drove each other away, clustered, were erased. They were all very long words, like Catalepsy, Thunderbird, Superrequeteriquísímo and Anticonstitutionally. The grille faded away, and suddenly the whole sky was covered with linked words, long sentences full of semicolons and inverted commas. For the space of a few seconds, there was this gigantic sheet of paper on which were written sentences that moved forward jerkily, changing their meaning, modifying their construction, altering completely as they advanced. It was beautiful, so beautiful that nothing like that had ever been read anywhere, and yet it was impossible to decipher the writing. It was all about death, or pity, or the incredible secrets that are hidden somewhere, at one of the farthest points of time. It was about water, too, about vast lakes floating just above the mountains, lakes shimmering under the cold wind. For a split second, Y. M. H., by screwing up his eyes, managed to read the writing, but it vanished with lightning speed and he could not be sure. It seemed to go like this: There's no reason to be afraid. No, there's no reason to be afraid. There's no reason to be afraid. There's no reason to be afraid. No. No, there's no reason to be afraid. No, there's no reason to be afraid.

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and

Needless to say, what whites now think and say about race has undergone a revolution. In fact, it would be hard to find other opinions broadly held by Americans that have changed so radically. What whites are now expected to think about race can be summarized as follows: Race is an insignificant matter and not a valid criterion for any purpose—except perhaps for redressing wrongs done to non-whites. The races are equal in every respect and are therefore interchangeable. It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States. These are matters on which there is little ground for disagreement; anyone who holds differing views is not merely mistaken but morally suspect. By these standards, of course, most of the great men of America’s past are morally suspect, and many Americans are embarrassed to discover what our traditional heroes actually said. Some people deliberately conceal this part of our history. For example, the Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.” The Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1942. A more contemporary approach to the past is to bring out all the facts and then repudiate historical figures. This is what author Conor Cruise O’Brien did in a 1996 cover story for The Atlantic Monthly. After detailing Jefferson’s views, he concluded: “It follows that there can be no room for a cult of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of an effectively multiracial America . . . . Once the facts are known, Jefferson is of necessity abhorrent to people who would not be in America at all if he could have had his way.” Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial “stone by stone.” It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washington owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history. This, in effect, is what some people wish to do. American colonists and Victorian Englishmen saw the expansion of their race as an inspiring triumph. Now it is cause for shame. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote Susan Sontag. The wealth of America used to be attributed to courage, hard work, and even divine providence. Now, it is common to describe it as stolen property. Robin Morgan, a former child actor and feminist, has written, “My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony.

When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

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.

Her diction was formal, her sentence structure entirely grammatical—indeed, you could almost hear the commas, semicolons and full stops.

In a Scala program, a semicolon at the end of a statement is usually optional. You can type one if you want but you don't have to if the statement appears by itself on a single line.

Do I am, then, to strip away all the stylistic accoutrements of French and achieve a sort of 'degree zero,' to borrow the famous expression coined by Roland Barthes? I don't think so... I did study under Barthes's ægis for a couple of years, however, and he definitely contributed to my extreme (not to say hyper) sensitivity to language; he taught me to be wary of (not to say allergic to) 'readymade' expressions, and it is to him that I owe my penchant for parentheses, colons, semicolons, ellipses... and overlong sentences; I both appreciate and resent this influence.

Among the honeysuckles Sits the dandelion Sticking out like A semicolon In a poem

We miss-punctuate life since we stopped using semicolons our days too fast-paced pauses are time that feels stolen We jump from comma to comma on the to-do lists in stock till the body halts in a burnout: an inkless pen’s full stop

Kurt Vonnegut was unequivocal in his last book, advising writers, “Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.

The semicolon is a much neglected beast

You’re an avid reader. You know the meaning of a 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.” Oh my God.

A drunk coworker had once let me know that I’d established myself as a somewhat retrograde cynic, a toxic presence in the office but ultimately safe from firing because, among other skills, I was one of only two people on staff who knew how semicolons worked; my leaving was a wash.

it was Manutius who invented italics, introduced the semicolon and gave the comma its distinctive hooked shape. As

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

You don’t look like a complete thought. You are paused at a semicolon placed by a careless author. I’m waiting for the second half of the sentence when maybe there isn’t even one at all.

As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon), the victimization of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape. And through it all there has always been some truly awful food. I

And what kind of doctor are you?” “I’m an English teacher.” “What kind, you say?” “I treat people who are having trouble with their colons.” “Oh.” “And semicolons.” “Oh! I see!” they’d say, more confused, looking around for assistance. My wife would intervene. “He’s not the kind of doctor who helps people,” she would say.

So many discrete racist or otherwise malignantly biased acts can be excused as meaningless matters of happenstance, just as a puzzle piece looks like an abstract blob of nothing until hundreds of them are assembled all together and then suddenly--we see.

Most non-programmers don't think of plaintext like that. To them, text files feel like filling in tax forms for an angry robotic auditor that yells at them if they forget a single semicolon.

Great. They fucked with my punctuation?” “Pam says you’re overly fond of semicolons.

in the second stanza, with many caesuras, commas, and semicolons that slow the rhythm and pace (for example, l. 3: “When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;”). The slow, heavy pace of the lines, coupled with the four repetitions of the introductory “when” phrases, emphasizes the narrator’s view of the lecture as long, drawn out, and repetitious. Even though the rest of the audience seems to appreciate the astronomer, giving him “much applause” (l. 4), the narrator

I had a book in my hand, and a semicolon cup of unflavoured tea for this morning in the other hand. I was alone, without my family and in a strange trance. I did, however have this book in my hand. The Great Gatsby, by the late F. Scott Fitzgerald. It didn’t matter how unpopular and hated the book was way back when. All thats was important to me was that I held something familiar in my hand. A book, and one that I knew of in 1931, was all that u needed to be content.

inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon),

Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

Note that if the second clause is preceded by an adverb, such as accordingly, besides, then, therefore, or thus, and not by a conjunction, the semicolon is still required.

So…the semicolon became a sorta symbol for this nonprofit movement that's dedicated to supporting people dealing with depression, suicide, mental illness, all that sort of thing. Wearing the symbol means we decided we're not over, we chose to keep going. It can also show that we lost someone close to us to suicide or know someone dealing with any of those things I mentioned. It's a symbol of hope.

Intellectually, [punctuation matters] a great deal. For if you are getting your commas, semicolons and full stops wrong, it means you are not getting your thoughts right and your mind is muddled’ – William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury 1897–1902

I should know better than to read even as much as a headline in The New York Times; although, as I've often pointed out to my students at Bishop Strachan this newspaper's use of the semicolon is exemplary. Reagan Declares Firmness on Gulf; Plans are Unclear Isn't that classic? I don't mean the semicolon; I mean, isn't that just what the world needs? Unclear firmness! That is typical American policy: don't be clear, but be firm!

You pretend to be other people to write their stories.” He made it sound like a bad thing. “Writing is a craft. Not everyone has the time to learn it in a way that makes it commercially viable.” Not everyone knew where to put a semicolon, or in the case of the pop star whose biography I’d just written, that it wasn’t a body part.

There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semi-colon. (the author is actually quoting a friend here)

You darling is my semicolon.

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.

Key to the Pronunciations This dictionary uses a simple respelling system to show how entries are pronounced, using the symbols listed below. Generally, only the first of two or more identical headwords will have a pronunciation respelling. Where a derivative simply adds a common suffix such as -less, -ness, or -ly to the headword, the derivative may not have a pronunciation respelling unless some other element of the pronunciation also changes. as in hat //, fashion // as in day //, rate // as in lot //, father //, barn // as in big // as in church //, picture // as in dog //, bed // as in men //, bet //, ferry // as in feet //, receive // as in air //, care // as in soda //, mother /, her // as in free //, graph //, tough // as in get //, exist // as in her //, behave // as in fit //, women // as in time /t/, hire //, sky // as in ear //, pierce // as in judge //, carriage // as in kettle //, cut //, quick // as in lap //, cellar //, cradle // as in main //, dam // as in need //, honor //, maiden // as in sing //, anger // as in go //, promote // as in law //, thought //, lore // as in boy //, noisy // as in wood //, sure // as in food //, music // as in mouse //, coward // as in put //, cap // as in run //, fur //, spirit // as in sit //, lesson //, face // as in shut //, social // as in top //, seat //, forty // as in thin //, truth // as in then //, father // as in very //, never // as in wait //, quit // as in when //, which // as in yet //, accuse // as in zipper //, musician // as in measure //, vision // Foreign Sounds as in Bach // as in en route //, Rodin / / as in hors d’oeuvre //, Goethe // as in Lully //, Utrecht // Stress Marks Stress (or accent) is represented by marks placed before the affected syllable. The primary stress mark is a short, raised vertical line // which signifies that the heaviest emphasis should be placed on the syllable that follows. The secondary stress mark is a short, lowered vertical line // which signifies a somewhat weaker emphasis than on the syllable with primary stress. Variant Pronunciations There are several ways in which variant pronunciations are indicated in the respellings. Some respellings show a pronunciation symbol within parentheses to indicate a possible variation in pronunciation; for example, in sandwich //. Variant pronunciations may be respelled in full, separated by semicolons. The more common pronunciation is listed first, if this can be determined, but many variants are so common and widespread as to be ofequal status. Variant pronunciations may be indicated by respelling only the part of the word that changes. A hyphen will replace the part of the pronunciation that has remained the same. Note: A hyphen sometimes serves to separate syllables where the respelling might otherwise look confusing, as at reinforce //.

comma: "John, you are a good man." In numeration, commas are used to express periods of three figures: "Mountains 25,000 feet high; 1,000,000 dollars." The Semicolon marks a slighter connection than the

4.02 Period 88 4.03 Comma 88 4.04 Semicolon 89 4.05 Colon 90 4.06 Dash 90 4.07 Quotation Marks 91 4.08 Double or Single

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.

inventions of things which they have no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semi-colon),

He said, “You’re an avid reader. You know the meaning of a 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.

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

If the writer finds that he has written a series of sentences of the type described, he should recast enough of them to remove the monotony, replacing them by simple sentences, by sentences of two clauses joined by a semicolon, by periodic sentences of two clauses, by sentences, loose or periodic, of three clauses—whichever best represent the real relations of the thought.

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.

salamander semicolon,

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

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

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

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.

Semicolon indicates it is yet to completed

In scripting, a careful coder ends every statement with a semicolon. (Sometimes complex, paragraph-like statements end with a curly bracket instead of a semicolon.

Who can ignore that the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit. They go from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commanding a fleet or a country from a yacht. They are everywhere and nowhere. That is how they fascinate people immersed into everyday life. They transcend everyday life, possess nature and leave it up to the cops to contrive culture. Is it essential to describe at length, besides the condition of youth, students and intellectuals, armies of workers with or without white collars, people from the provinces, the colonized and semi-colonized of all sorts, all those who endure a well-organized daily life, is it here necessary to exhibit the derisory and untragic misery of the inhabitant, of the suburban dweller and of the people who stay in residential ghettoes, in the mouldering centres of old cities and in the proliferations lost beyond them? One only has to open one's eyes to understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come home to recuperate enough to start again the next day. The picture of this generalized misery would not go without a picture of 'satisfactions' which hides it and becomes the means to elude it and break free from it.

My editor once told me semi-colons were like fine champagne, to be served sparingly. She's obviously never seen me with a bottle of Brut.

10. i forgot how to breathe 9. he robbed me of happiness 8. that sank me lower into my grave 7. do you feel dirty yet? 6. don’t forget to embalm my heart 5. i forget how to feel 4 . you make me numb 3. this isn’t healthy 2. so how can i escape from you? 1. & still remember how to breathe backwards from ten?

the darkness at the base of my brain whispers i dismiss it but it’s still there waiting for another chance - to break me

A colon is sometimes preferable to a semicolon if the thrust of the sentence is forward: you are amplifying something, providing a definition or a list or an illustration. The semicolon sets up a different relationship; whatever follows relates in a more subtle way to what came before. A dash can perform either of these services, but it is looser, less formal.

Some respellings show a pronunciation symbol within parentheses to indicate a possible variation in pronunciation; for example, in sandwich //. Variant pronunciations may be respelled in full, separated by semicolons. The more common pronunciation is listed first, if this can be determined, but many variants are so common and widespread as to be ofequal status. Variant pronunciations may be indicated by respelling only the part of the word that changes. A hyphen will replace the part of the pronunciation that has remained the same. Note: A hyphen sometimes serves to separate syllables where the respelling might otherwise look confusing, as at reinforce //.

Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well. But everything is different IRL.

The first English grammar book to achieve lasting influence and popularity by creating laws for language was Robert Lowth’s 1758 A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Lowth boldly announced that it was his aim to “lay down rules” for grammar. These rules, he felt, were usually best presented by showing violations of them along with judicious corrections. Accordingly, he assembled examples from some of the very worst syntactical offenders available in English at the time, true grammatical failures including Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Swift, and Milton.