Great Sentences Quotes

#1. If you are a senior executive, you need to embrace each individual's right to choose his or her own hardships - and you must talk about that openly, candidly.

Bill Jensen

#2. As with most great communicators, God knows that the point of silence and the pause between sentences is not to give the audience the chance to fill the silence with empty babbling but to help create more depth to the conversation.

Renita J. Weems

#3. What else exhausts like sustained deception?

Leif Enger

#4. There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

Julio Cortazar

#5. Keep your mouth shut and see what's happening around you. Don't finish people's sentences for them. Don't just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they're saying it. That was great training for writing.

Amy Bloom

#6. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

Bertrand Russell

#7. It's part of the job to compensate for outfit.

Victoria Pratt

#8. What a fantastic piece of hot lustful woman she was, Roger thought irrelevantly.

Robert Anton Wilson

#9. This is what I know about my parents. They spent the next several years trying to forget each other, and me.

Raquel Cepeda

#10. An ending was an ending. No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have the last word.

Sarah Dessen

#11. He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into the short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Samuel Johnson

#12. You can't not like 'The Great Gatsby.' It's got the best sentences in, like, ever.

John Green

#13. I've had nannies and au pairs. I have tutors and a trainer and a shrink. I know paid-nice. It comes with gritted teeth.

Tanya Egan Gibson

#14. Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.

Vera Nazarian

#15. All the great writers are like that: the beauty of their sentences, like the beauty of a woman one has not yet met, is unforeseeable ...

Marcel Proust

#16. Give him numbers, he's great. Give him words and sentences to put together and his forehead creases down so you can see exactly what he'll look like when he's eighty.

Patrick Ness

#17. What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.

Anne Carson

#18. It's so hard to think in winter. The world seems confined in the space of your heart; you can't see beyond yourself.

Patricia A. McKillip

#19. David was catnip and kryptonite to me.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#20. The song instantly insisted it'd never existed.

David Mitchell

#21. You can choose to listen to one end of the spectrum or the other on Twitter, just like you can on television. But hopefully what we've done is given a voice to that broad middle ground.

Dick Costolo

#22. Every great novel begins with a single word. One word, followed by another and another and another. Sentences forming paths to that dream.

Pamela Morris

#23. By small and simple sentences, great books come to pass.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#24. I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves ... I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.

Daniel Day-Lewis

#25. A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.

James Patterson

#26. It was terrible and awful when someone left you. You could move on, do the best you could, but like Eli had said, an ending was an ending. No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have to have the last word.

Sarah Dessen

#27. The sentences in the book of providence are sometimes long, and you must read a great way before you understand their meaning.

Matthew Henry

#28. Artistically, I find jokes really satisfying aesthetically, because there's something great about getting an idea down to a sentence or two.

Demetri Martin

#29. I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

Tom Perrotta

#30. On any given day, I'm likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences - or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.

Michael Dirda

#31. He swings the knocker against the door. The entire building booms like a drum. It continues booming after he lets go, banging like a clock striking the hour, rattling like a great tin drum.

Christopher Bram

#32. I never had any facial hair in my life.

Rachel Maddow