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

Lynne Truss

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Lynne Truss
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: May 31
Author
Journalist
Writer
Kingston
Protection
Wings
Start
Society
Apostrophe
Militant
Wing

More quotes by Lynne Truss

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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
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If we looked inside ourselves and remembered how insignificant we are, just for a couple of minutes a day, respect for other people would be an automatic result.
Lynne Truss
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The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
Lynne Truss
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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
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As with email, the recipient of a texted question seems to have the option to ignore it, while nevertheless saying hello, lovely day, and so on.
Lynne Truss
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Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.
Lynne Truss
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I hate to be treated as if I'm invisible. I get incensed when people talk across me or refuse to catch my eye in a restaurant or shop.
Lynne Truss
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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
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What one discovers in life, I find, is that one's personality defects don't come and go.
Lynne Truss
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After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.
Lynne Truss
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Texting is a supremely secretive medium of communication - it's like passing a note - and this means we should be very careful what we use it for.
Lynne Truss
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I am not against marriage. I lived with someone for 11 years. But we weren't in love, and I thought that was quite important.
Lynne Truss
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Oh, the illusion of choice in the modern world - don't get me started. But don't you agree that the Internet has softened our brains and made us forget that 'choice' used to mean something different from selecting options from menus?
Lynne Truss
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The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.
Lynne Truss
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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
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The idea of withholding a massive secret is obviously quite exciting to some people. It is also the basis of much classic drama, of course, from Sophocles onwards.
Lynne Truss
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Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
Lynne Truss
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It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it's nearly everybody.
Lynne Truss
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All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.
Lynne Truss
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I do needlepoint from kits. I give them as gifts to people in the form of cushion covers and they are often speechless with horror.
Lynne Truss