Batch help--

This is probably so simple, it's stupid to anyone who frequents this forum, but I'm kind of stuck. I'm trying to make a cheap, stupid, but functional messaging program here at work for use over the LAN using command prompt batch files. One problem I ran into was having the batch file take a string with spaces for a variable. The other was more of a question - is it possible to have a batch file wait for input before finish the code? I've done quite a few things with batch files over the years, but never attempted anything that used variables with spaces.. Thanks for your time if you've read this far.