Quote

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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Lynne Truss
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: May 31
Author
Journalist
Writer
Kingston
Traffic
Notice
Slow
Mark
Detour
Stop
Detours
Language
Punctuation
Tell
Marks
Take
Signals

More quotes by 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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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.
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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 main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day.
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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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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Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.
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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The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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 my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the world around them.
Lynne Truss
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Nice clothes fall apart. Nice clocks don't work. Bits fall off the nice cooker. It is hard to accept that pricing is unrelated to quality, but it's plainly true. Nowadays, we pay the price that satisfies our particular personality type and then we live with the painful consequences.
Lynne Truss
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You should read Wodehouse when you're well and when you're poorlywhen you're travelling, and when you're notwhen you're feeling clever, and when you're feeling utterly dim. Wodehouse always lifts your spirits,no matter how high they happen to be already.
Lynne Truss