"The nature of the labyrinth, I scribbled into my spiral notebook, and the way out of it. This teacher rocked. I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn't sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it. I'm in class, so teach me."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"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)

"No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines--ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives..."
— Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)

"The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain."
— Lisa St. Aubin de Terán (The Palace)

"In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure."
— Scarlett Thomas (Going Out)

"Two classical and archetypal structures. . . . the stranger comes to town and the journey."
— Sharon Creech ("Leaping Off the Porch," Origins of Story, eds. Barbara Harrison & Gregory Maguire)