When I sit down to put final touches on prose, I like to read the work of an author I admire before I start. Recently, I've been spending a few minutes reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. He's a brilliant story teller and word smith. I found this little gem, where he uses a colon about as well as one can be used in figurative prose (I usually think of a colon being used in technical writing):
Then: quiet.
So beautiful and subtle. The rest of it is this:
Then: quiet. Marie-Laure listens to the trees rustle; her blood swarms. For a long and panicked minute, she crawls among the leaves at the foot of the bench until her fingers find her cane.
Also notice the great use of a semi colon in that paragraph, creating a soft and perfect connection between two independent clauses. Brilliant. Using a subordinating conjunction would have been the more common choice, but the following just isn't as poetic:
Marie-Laure listens to the trees rustle, and her blood swarms.
Nor would the harshness of a full stop:
I love well crafted prose, and I doubt I'll ever be as good as Anthony Doerr, but he inspired me to be better.