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There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

Lynne Truss

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Lynne Truss
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: May 31
Author
Journalist
Writer
Kingston
Taken
Never
People
Comma
Oxford
Embrace
Drink

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.
Lynne Truss
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What one discovers in life, I find, is that one's personality defects don't come and go.
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As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being.
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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Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word punctilious (attentive to formality or etiquette) comes from the same original root as punctuation.
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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The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.
Lynne Truss
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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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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 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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The way people behave towards each other is a measure of their value as human beings.
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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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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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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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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I used to help my dad with a stall selling eggs when I was about 12. People were so hard up they would ask for one egg. But mostly no one came by at all. It was very demoralising.
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