Question

He pulls himself together quickly, though, muttering a soft "Sorry" to Sam.

This has been bugging me... In this context, I do mean the "Sorry" as a direct quote, but since I'm not using "he said" or any other such tags, I'm a bit uncertain how the capitalization/punctuation works. Any help?

Answer 1

http://grammartips.homestead.com/inside.html
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/01/

From the second one: "3. Do not use a capital letter when the quoted material is a fragment or only a piece of the original material's complete sentence."

Answer 2

Awesome, thanks!

Answer 3

np. have fun!