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Lynne Truss QUOTES

Lynne Truss QUOTES

1 " I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course. "

― Lynne Truss , Making the Cat Laugh

2 " Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon. "

― Lynne Truss , Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door

3 " ...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it. "

― Lynne Truss , Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door

4 " Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, buy the fifth series of The Sopranos, divorce your spouse, sell up and move to Devon, or adopt a child from Guatemala. "

― Lynne Truss , Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door

5 " When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

6 " We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

7 " Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up. "

― Lynne Truss , Tennyson's Gift: Stories from the Lynne Truss Omnibus, Book 2

8 " No valentines from the cats again. "

― Lynne Truss , Making the Cat Laugh

9 " We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

10 " Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

11 " The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

12 " Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

13 " The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

14 " To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

15 " For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

16 " There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

17 " If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

18 " 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. "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

19 " 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? "

― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

20 " Offence is so easily given. And where the 'minority' issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining characteristic; you are supposed to be blind to it. But then, on other occasions, you are supposed to observe special sensitivity, or show special respect. "

― Lynne Truss , Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door