Quotations and Dialogue

Q. If I have two separate quotations joined by and, do I use commas before and after and? For example: She said, “Get out of here,” and, “I’m so in love with you.”

A. Those two commas are defensible if you read “and” as shorthand for “and she also said.” But that’s asking those commas to do a lot of work. Try leaving them out:

She said, “Get out of here” and “I’m so in love with you.”

But what’s going on here? Were these two statements made on separate occasions, or did one follow the other? Consider giving readers a bit more to go on than a simple conjunction. For example:

She said, “Get out of here,” and then, “I’m so in love with you.”

You could still omit the second and third commas from that version, especially if your text features open rather than close punctuation (the links are to the entries for those terms in Merriam-Webster; see senses 17 and 16, respectively, under the adjectives). In other words, there isn’t a strict right and wrong here (even the comma after said is a matter of convention rather than logic; see CMOS 12.14). See also CMOS 6.16.

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]