Imagine you want to leave a note for someone. You write the message on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope. The envelope around your note keeps the message contained and separate from other things. It's the same idea with terminating string literals. A string literal is like the note you wrote, while terminating it is like sealing the envelope. Here's an example: The phrase "Hello, world!" is the string literal, while the double quotation marks tell the computer where the string begins and ends.