commas QUOTES

1 " Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.  "

― Dark Jar Tin Zoo , Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.

2 " Nexus

I wrote stubbornly into the evening.
At the window, a giant praying mantis
rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,
begging vacantly with pale eyes;

and the commas leapt at me like worms
or miniature scythes blackened with age.
the praying mantis screeched louder,
his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.

I walked outside;
the grass hissed at my heels.
Up ahead in the lapping darkness
he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,
a brontosaurus, a poet. "

― Rita Dove

3 " Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason -- if the worlds are in any way blurred -- the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'. "

― Raymond Carver , Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose

4 " Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise. "

― Michael Ondaatje

5 " The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak. "

― Jodi Picoult , My Sister's Keeper

6 " I have written all the 406 pages of my book in Swahili words. Even the countries are in Swahili. Instead of 'Nigeria', for example, I have written 'Nijeria'. That is how it is written in the Swahili dictionary. This can seem as a minor detail and that people may find my mission close to ridiculous! However, single letters and commas matter. "

― Enock Maregesi

7 " 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. "

― Alice Hoffman , Property Of

8 " Okay, let’s put it this way. I would like to sleep with you. But it’s alright if I don’t sleep with you. What I’m saying is I’d like to be as fair as possible. I don’t want to force anything on anybody, any more than I’d want anything forced on me. It’s enough that I feel your presence or see your commas swirling around me. "

― Haruki Murakami , The Elephant Vanishes

9 " To my editors, I graciously thank you. I now know “is” and “was” aren't the same thing. It's the periods and commas that got me. Can't see the darn things. "

― S.N. Deinscheiss , Wuwpoo

10 " If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic. "

― Mary Norris

11 " 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. "

― Ada Maria Soto