"A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool."

"A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool. In fact, hostility to this most delicate and lyrical of punctuation marks is a sure sign of a deformed soul and a savage sensibility. 

    "Conscious life is not a brute concatenation of discrete units of experience; it is often fluid, resistant to strict divisions and impermeable partitions, punctuated by moments of transition that are neither exactly terminal nor exactly continuous in character. Meaning, moreover, is often held together by elusive connections, ambiguous shifts of reference, mysterious coherences. And art should use whatever instruments it has at its disposal to express these ambiguous eventualities and perplexing alternations. 

    "To master the semicolon is to master prose. To master the semicolon is to master language's miraculous capacity for capturing the shape of reality."

~ David Bentley Hart from his post 'On Writing, Part Two' [hat tip @NickFreiling]