Lynne Truss - People Quotes

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Previously, people said 'you know?' and 'know what I'm saying?' at the end of every sentence. Now they don't bother with the words and just use the question marks, to save time. Everything ends up becoming a question? I'm talking about statements? It's getting quite annoying?

Lynne Truss
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
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
'I write quite differently in emails,' people say, with a look of inspired and happy puzzlement — a look formerly associated only with starry-eyed returnees from alien abductions. 'Yes, I write quite differently in emails, especially in the punctuation. I feel it's OK to use dashes all the time, and exclamation marks. And those dot, dot, dot things!'

Lynne Truss
By tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll.

Lynne Truss
Nowadays the fashion is against grammatical fussiness. A passage peppered with commas... smacks simply of no backbone. People who put in all the commas betray themselves as moral weaklings with empty lives and out-of-date reference books.

Lynne Truss
The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

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

Lynne Truss