"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)

"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)

"Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking."
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

"Part of one's despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else -- yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-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. Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions. Being burned as a witch is not safely enough off the agenda."
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

"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)

"No valentines from the cats again."
— Lynne Truss (Making the Cat Laugh)

"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)

"Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person."
— 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)

"I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course."
— Lynne Truss (Making the Cat Laugh)

"Proper punctuation is both the sign and cause of clear thinking."
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

"Sticklers never read a book without a pencil at hand, to correct the typographical errors. In short, we are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families."
— Lynne Truss