Semicolon Quotes

“Whether it’s the Manual that peers down from your bookshelf, or Strunk and White, or the APA style guide, or Fowler, or Lynne Truss, it’s fair to ask why we consider these books authoritative, and if there might not be some better way to assess our writing than through their dicta.”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

“The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

“At times I've felt less like a punctuation theorist than like a punctuation therapist”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

“So many discrete racist or otherwise malignantly biased acts can be excused as meaningless matters of happenstance, just as a puzzle piece looks like an abstract blob of nothing until hundreds of them are assembled all together and then suddenly--we see.”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

“There’s an extent to which your analysis of your own work is an interesting jumping-off point for criticism, but there’s equally an extent to which your writing is its own entity and exists independent of you and your intentions and your hopes and dreams.”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

“In its narrative structure and ambition as well as its themes, Moby-Dick was ahead of its time, in uncharted waters. Just as sailors needed instruments to wander out past sight of shore, Moby-Dick required writing technologies that could allow it to venture out beyond the genre constraints of its time, and one of those technological marvels—as slender and significant as a compass needle—was the semicolon.”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

“In The Merchant of Venice, it isn’t a pie-in-the-sky ideal of mercy that tips figurative scales of justice, but the threat of real flesh tipping real metal scales that determines the outcome of the trial. If there is mercy in the outcome for Antonio, it is an incidental by-product of precision.”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

“In February 1905, the Liquor Law Committee convened a group of “friends and foes of the semicolon” to discuss the law. For neither the first nor the last time in history, a bunch of men sat around in a room fretting that given a taste of any kind of freedom (in this case, in the form of liquor), women might ride off the rails of decency.”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

“The first English grammar book to achieve lasting influence and popularity by creating laws for language was Robert Lowth’s 1758 A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Lowth boldly announced that it was his aim to “lay down rules” for grammar. These rules, he felt, were usually best presented by showing violations of them along with judicious corrections. Accordingly, he assembled examples from some of the very worst syntactical offenders available in English at the time, true grammatical failures including Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Swift, and Milton.”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

“Kurt Vonnegut was unequivocal in his last book, advising writers, “Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.”
― Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark