Semicolon Quotes

“Semicolon, you dolt!”

— Jean Shepherd

How hideous is the semicolon.

— Samuel Beckett

“The semicolon is a much neglected beast”

— Randall McCutcheon

“Stay Strong. Love endlessly. Change Lives.”

— Amy Bleuel

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

— Alan Perlis

I'm pretty sure when I need a comma; I'm not so sure about a semicolon.

— Keith Hernandez

“You didn’t put a semicolon there — God did.”

— Eleanor Brownn

I love the semicolon; it's unnecessary, but graceful and sophisticated.

— Brian P. Cleary

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

— Abraham Lincoln

“The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”.”

— Lynne Truss

“Use the semicolon like you would use any powerful weapon (your best pick-up line or your most effective push-up bra): carefully and…

— Jenny Baranick

I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of…

— Truman Capote

“Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as…

— Victor Klemperer

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and…

— Lynne Truss

“I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed…

— Camille Desmoulins

Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path…

— Lewis Thomas

The dash helps to indicate that the two thoughts are intimately related, and it's less stodgy than a semicolon, which would have…

— Bill Walsh

If a period is a stop sign, then what kind of traffic flow is created by other marks? The comma is a…

— Roy Peter Clark

I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial…

— Henry Miller

A semicolon is used when a sentence could have ended but then was continued. Take a minute and realize this is symbolizing…

— Anonymous

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself,…

— Pico Iyer

“When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of…

— Hilary Mantel

“The semicolon, my friends, is the punctuation mark we use to join two complete sentences. When we want to separate two complete…

— Jenny Baranick

“Nora— Forgive me for copyediting, but it must be said—you have raped the semicolon yet again. Stop it. It wasn’t asking for…

— Tiffany Reisz

“the American essayist Lewis Thomas on the semicolon: The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full…

— Lynne Truss

It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is…

— Lewis Thomas

“We might also want to use a semicolon to hold together two sentences to avoid giving the reader too much time to…

— Jenny Baranick

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and…

— Lynne Truss

Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes…

— Reshma Saujani

“I love you like a semicolon; a half-pause in a torrent of thought during which life stutters into being. I want to…

— Ophaelia Automn

Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to…

— George Will

“The stops point out, with truth, the time of pause A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause. t ev'ry comma, stop while…

— Cecil Hartley

She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There…

— Helen Hodgman

I don't even know how to use a semicolon to this day; I use a comma every time. And you know what?…

— Hannibal Buress

If the semicolon is one of the neglected children in the family of punctuation marks these days, told to stay in its…

— John Humphrys

“So we’re seemingly in quite a pickle. Sometimes a period provides too much pause between these two sentences, but the comma doesn’t…

— Jenny Baranick