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Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation QUOTES

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

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

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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation. "

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

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

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

16 " Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas? "

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

17 " I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no right-minded person would willingly be sucked, for three years, with no guarantee of a job at the end. "

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

18 " Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of "The Lord of the Rings". You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold. "

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

19 " No one else understands us 7th sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes, we are often aggressively instructed to 'get a life' by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves. "

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

20 " That man was Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515) and I will happily admit I hadn't heard of him until about a year ago, but am now absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his babies. "

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