Semicolon Examples


You can get by without ever using semicolons. Some writers, in fact, hate them. But many others love them.


  1. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. [Martin Luther King, Jr. "An Experiment in Love: Nonviolent Resistance"]

  2. What we find when we enter these mortal plains is existence; but existence is the raw material out of which all life must be created. [Martin Luther King, "Black Power"]

  3. One sallies out and then, frightened by his own temerity, hurries back; but safely inside he looks out longingly, ready to be off again. [Margaret Mead, "Adolescents"]

  4. Children are safe in their childhood as long as they are unready; and each chooses when to begin courtship and the first tentative search for a mate. [Margaret Mead, "Adolescents"]

  5. Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong. [Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"]

  6. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son whi is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

    [Martin Luther King, "Letter from Birmingham Jail"]

  7. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. [Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"]

  8. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. [Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"]

  9. If the plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man. [Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"]

  10. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. [George Orwell, "A Hanging"]

  11. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. [George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"]

  12. Donald Duck also adopts more juvenile features through time. His elongated beak recedes and his eyes enlarge; he converges on Huey, Louie, and Dewey as surely as Mickey approaches Morty. [Stepen Jay Gould, "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse"]

  13. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up where a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. [Annie Dillard, "The Death of a Moth"]

  14. The only time I mind being alone is when something is funny; then, when I am laughing at something funny, I wish someone were around. [Annie Dillard, "The Death of a Moth"]

  15. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. [Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook"]



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