Some Examples of Colon Usage

Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. [George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"]
A few more weeks, and the water is alive with masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind legs, then forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle of the summer, the new generation of toads, smaller than one's thumbnail but perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to begin the game anew. ["George Orwell, "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad"]
On the other hand, the villagers are able, presumably, to come and go as they please--which they do: to another town at the foot of the mountain, with a population of approximately five thousand, the nearest place to see a movie or go to the bank. [James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village"]
My wife says every man she's been familiar with would smell his socks at night before he went to bed: just a whiff--each sock, not only one. [Edward Hoagland, "The Problem of the Golden Rule"]
I was insisting and reiterating that I was a human being: if I could get that message across to him he would stop shooting at me. [Edward Hoagland, "The Problem of the Golden Rule."]
As I now recall it, there was only one sensation in my head: pure elation mixed with amazement at such perfection. [Lewis Thomas, "The Tucson Zoo"]
But I came away from the zoo with something, a piece of news about myself: I am coded, somehow, for otters and beavers. [Lewis Thomas, "The Tucson Zoo"]
One thing I'd like to know most of all: when those ants have made the Hill, and are all there, touching and exchanging, and the whole mass begins to behave like a single huge creature, and thinks, what on earth is that thought? [Lewis Thomas, "The Tucson Zoo"]
But this sentence was not allowed to spoil the effect: It was withheld from the press. [Barbara Tuchman, "Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead"]
In fact, tides and trains sharply illustrate my point: One depends on the moon and is certain; the other depends on man and is uncertain. [Barbara Tuchman, "Is History a Guide to the Future?"]
She is knocked out from getting most of us ready: I hold my neck stiff against the pressure of her knuckles as she hastily completes the braiding and then beribboning of my hair. [Alice Walker, "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self"]
Opportunism and greed: there you had your much-vaunted corporate business world. [Tom Wolfe, "The Right Stuff"]
This theory isn't as high-falutin' as it sounds: De Picciotto is just pointing out that, for a tennis player in an important match, it is much easier to shut out an awareness of the plight of the horned owl than to resist the distractions of personal problems. [Peter Bodo, "The Human Side of Steffi Graf," Tennis, Sept. 1990, p. 46.]
17. The man lobbed peas at me in restaurants, he put mucus on doorknobs, he once crept under the dais and tied tin cans to my ankle as I accepted an award from the Women's Club, and finally he got the close-up he wanted: me, enraged, stricken, lurching at him, hair disheveled, waving my arms, mouth like an open wound, spit dripping, a maniac. [Garrison Keillor, "That Old 'Picayune-Moon'" Harper's Sept 1990, p. 70.]

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