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Commas with QuotationsA maxim, proverb, or quote should be set off from the rest of the sentence by commas.
- The old man muttered,"Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?"
- He thought fondly and desperately of his motto, be cool, which never did him any good.
If the quotation is used as a noun in the sentence, the comma should not be used.
- "Get out, and take your mucus with you" was hardly the sympathetic greeting the flu victim expected from his healthy friends.
- "I wanna lick the syrup off your hotcakes" was her favorite line in a song by Merlo Hag.
A comma is not used with an indirect quote.
- G. K. Chesterton says that coincidences are spiritual puns.
- Sola Crespusci remarked to her cohorts that poetry is mostly vacant exercises done at majestic hours.
A comma should not be used to set off a quote that acts as the object within the sentence.
- Dr. Kirkengog defined teasing as "an excessive attention to something you're just as soon not have noticed at all."
- For Max Ernst, collage was "an exploration of the fortuitous encounter upon a non-suitable plane of two mutually distant realities."
When a comma is called for at the end of material within quotation marks, parentheses, or brackets, it goes inside the quotation marks but outside the parentheses or brackets.
- She scrunched her shoulder up next to his (all the while thinking of Thomas), and the shadows obligingly obliterated what was wrong with his face.
Tammy Hoover Smith is a brilliant author but an indifferent speller; she is most well-known for the line "Papa, you're thru [sic]," from the best-selling poem "Papa."
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