Ellipses In Quotes

“I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.”

— Isaac Marion

“I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.”

— Edmund White

“What the ethnographer is in fact faced with-except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection-is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households ... writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a manuscript-foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.”

— Clifford Geertz

“I wonder at my incapacity for easy banter, smooth conversation, empty words to fill awkward moments. I don't have a closet filled with umms and ellipses ready to insert at the beginnings and ends of sentences. I don't know how to be a verb, an adverb, any kind of modifier. I'm a noun through and through.”

— Tahereh Mafi

“The Semitic religions of Abrahamic lineage present themselves as gifts come down from Heaven at a particular moment in history; now in order for them to be able to impinge on whole collectives, that is, to convert them and to integrate them, they must appeal to volitive and emotional factors, and this clearly has nothing to do with pure intellection, or a sophisticated dialectic. The monotheists were finally in need of Hellenism, not only to learn how to give more explicit account of their intellectual intentions, but also in order to promote the blossoming forth of intellection itself, thanks precisely to the aid of a more supple means of expression than the symbols and ellipses of the Scriptures.”

— Frithjof Schuon

“I caution against beginning or ending a quotation with ellipses.”

— Bill Walsh

“Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus.”

— Johannes Kepler

“At some signal, floodlights around the lip of the crater were switched on, and the bright earthlight was obliterated by a far more brilliant glare. In the lunar vacuum the beams were, of course, completely invisible; they formed overlapping ellipses of blinding white, centered on the monolith. And where they touched it, its ebon surface seemed to swallow them. Pandora's box, thought Floyd, with a sudden sense of foreboding-waiting to be opened by inquisitive Man. And what will he find inside?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

“We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.”

— Fernando Pessoa

“I had my Boswell, once," Mason tells Boswell, "Dixon and I. We had a joint Boswell. Preacher nam'd Cherrycoke. Scribbling ev'rything down, just like you, Sir. Have you," twirling his Hand in Ellipses,- "you know, ever . . . had one yourself? If I'm not prying." "Had one what?" "Hum . . . a Boswell, Sir,- I mean, of your own. Well you couldn't very well call him that, being one yourself,- say, a sort of Shadow ever in the Room who has haunted you, preserving your ev'ry spoken remark,- " "Which else would have been lost forever to the great Wind of Oblivion,- think," armsweep south, "as all civiliz'd Britain gathers at this hour, how much shapely Expression, from the titl'd Gambler, the Barmaid's Suitor, the offended Fopling, the gratified Toss-Pot, is simply fading away upon the Air, out under the Door, into the Evening and the Silence beyond. All those voices. Why not pluck a few words from the multitudes rushing toward the Void of forgetfulness?”

— Thomas Pynchon

“Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer ... or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded
the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non- violent ... They must harass, debate, petition, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps
and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities ... The acceptance of our condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children [ellipses in source].”

— Lorraine Hansberry

“The kind of intelligence a genius has is a different sort of intelligence. The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where.”

— Dorothy Thompson

“If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.”

— Alice Meynell

“And we must invent dynamic designs to go with them and express them in equally dynamic shapes: triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses, circles, etc.”

— Giacomo Balla

“The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.”

— Michel De Certeau

“I didn't have any looks, I didn't have any talent, and it was easy for me to say to the Lord, "I don't have anything." If you only knew where I came from ... this leetle-bitty town with no more than twelve hundred people in it. So ... anything I am today, He is the one who has done it [ellipses in source].”

— Kathryn Kuhlman

“If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms ...”

— Jonathan Swift

“Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.”

— Carl Von Clausewitz