cemerick, I've hacked both Ruby & Clojure, so I can comment on the way Ruby handles stings.

Ruby has a concept of a 'string', as opposed to a "string". 'This is strict input, no escapes' "This is input with escapes"

I think that the suggested \" method is the best solution in Clojure.

You could just pick a different delimiter for strings within the interpolated string, and do a string-replace-all with \" before parsing. (although then you have to find delimiters that aren't used in the language normally, possibly the | or something).