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For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds the shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.

-Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003

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[James] Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: “Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living-room’?” And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. “This particular comma,” Thurber explained, “was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”

-Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003

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Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots … you stop.

-Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003

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She stood for a long time looking at the verses in which Emily Dickinson had chronicled her heartbreak. Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always *someone* who understood — it was just that so very often they were dead, and in a book.

–A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson, 1985

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It isn’t the great big pleasures that count the most; it’s making a great deal out of the little ones.

-Judy in Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster, 1912

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[excerpt from letter]: “If you won’t agree [to our marriage], I think I’ll break all the windows in the house and drown myself in a bucket.”

…

“He wants to marry Bramble!”

The King smiled. “Just so.”

“He’s around the twist,” said Azalea. “Breaking all the windows? He’s mad!”

“Ah, no,” said the King. “It’s only madness if you actually do it. If you *want* to break all the windows in the house and drown yourself in a bucket but don’t actually do it, well, that’s love.”

–Entwined by Heather Dixon, 2011

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It isn’t the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh–I think that requires spirit.

Judy in Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster, 1912

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History seldom shows its significance all at once…

-A Short History of Canada by Desmond Morton

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‘Whatever comes,’ she said, ‘cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.’

-Sara Crewe in A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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Once … I passed the edge of a huge ravine a foot deep, where a winged monster as big as myself attacked me, and I fled and wept. My father drew for me a picture of the tragedy with a rhyme beneath:

There was a small boy in Bombay
Who once from a hen ran away
When they said: ‘You’re a baby,’
He replied, ‘Well, I may be:
But I don’t like these hens of Bombay.’

This consoled me. I have thought well of hens ever since.

-Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself