Punctuation is Poetic

I had to check some punctuation usage in this grant I'm writing --since I was actually correcting my boss's sentence, I wanted to be sure I was right-- and I stumbled across this lovely description:

“Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.”


— Lewis Thomas, “Notes on Punctuation,”
The Medusa and the Snail 1979 —