Mags

“Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“But good writers have a reason for doing things the way they do them, and if you tinker with their work, taking it upon yourself to neutralize a slightly eccentric usage or zap a comma or sharpen the emphasis of something that the writer was deliberately keeping obscure, you are not helping. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. They weigh queries, and they accept or reject them for good reasons. They are not defensive. The whole point of having things read before publication is to test their effect on a general reader. You want to make sure when you go out there that the tag on the back of your collar isn’t poking up—unless, of course, you are deliberately wearing your clothes inside out.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Fiddlesticks” is Scarlett O’Hara’s way of saying “Fuck this shit.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“...lace is formed from the absence of substance; it is imagined in the spaces between the threads. Lace is a thing like hope. It lived, it survived, and it was desired for what it was not. If faith, as the nuns said, was the substance of things hoped for, then lace was the outline - the suggestion - of things not seen.”
― Iris Anthony, The Ruins of Lace