Famous punctuation marks in literature

Kathryn Schulz went looking for those rare moments in literature where “punctuation pops its head up over the prose” and found five noteworthy uses. For instance, a period at the end of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table (spoilers?):

“It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.”

And Nabokov’s Lolita made the list, but I expected this bit:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

rather than:

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three…”

(via df)

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