cancellation character?

Isn’t there a character that cancels the special function of the following character so you can include quotes in a string? I could have swore it was a “” so that i could have

set theString to ““This text is in quotes””
print theString

and the result would be
“this text is in quotes”

is that it? or is it something else?

You guessed OK, but you have a typo. It should be:

set theString to ""This text is in quotes""

And you can use the command “display dialog” to see the results:

display dialog theString