It means that:
print "this line continues" "on the next line"
does not work, while the following works:
a = "this line continues" "on the next line"
As has been pointed out already, it doesn't. The right way to look at this is not using the statement/expression distinction, but to look at whether the newline between the two literals is significant to the parser or not. A significant newline ends a statement; an insignificant one is equivalent to a space. The rule is that newlines (outside string quotes anyway) are significant unless either escaped with \, or contained within matching parentheses. So if you want to print or assign a long string broken across multiple lines without having to use triple-quoted strings (which have their own set of issues), you can write this: print ("this line continues" " on the next line") Note that I fixed a common buglet in your example: the words "continues" and "on" should be separated by a space. Not important for the example, of course, but (having used this idiom and similar ones a lot) something to keep in mind when splitting a long string across a line this way. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)