Top 100 Paragraph Quotes
#1. By the time we were knit in our mothers' wombs, our lives were like open books before Him
every sentence read, every paragraph indented, every chapter titled, every page numbered. He knew it all in advance
all the sin, all the selfishness, every weakness. Yet He chose to love us
lavishly.
Beth Moore
#2. If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.
Tana French
#3. I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit.
Robert Rankin
#4. Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You're allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to; you only need to get it right once.
Tana French
#5. I don't have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.
Flannery O'Connor
#6. ...clutching the Book to his chest, under his crossed arms, as if trying to press it into his ribs, until his lungs filled with letters and his heart became a pulsing paragraph.
Traci Chee
#7. Grab 'em in the first paragraph, hold 'em until the last period and leave them wanting more!
Bobbi Cole Meyer
#8. At university - when I was supposed to be studying biochemistry - I had tried to write a children's book about a boy and a wolf cub, and there was a paragraph in that which was from the wolf's point of view.
Michelle Paver
#9. I find that it takes a lot of years of living, and many more of reckoning, to come up with one worthwhile paragraph. And when a deadline looms, prayer doesn't hurt, either.
Carmen Agra Deedy
#10. You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.
Carl Hiaasen
#11. He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.
Sebastian Faulks
#12. My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.
Anne Lamott
#13. I like things to be really, really funny, or really, really dramatic. Those books are certainly the ones that grab me. I like the exercise of reading through a paragraph, and it's just torture. I try not to have my eyes dart to the right. That's the stuff that I love.
Angie Harmon
#14. Like deathbed conversions, last paragraph soul-saving does not convince.
Rosellen Brown
#15. Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, - or from one of our elder poets, - in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
George Eliot
#16. the text box (see screen shot in Step #5) that there is a bullet. This might be fine for listing items, but when you want to type a paragraph, this feature can be annoying. To eliminate bullets, click on the text box. Choose Bullets and Numbering from the
Anonymous
#17. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
Philip Roth
#18. When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
Colleen Hoover
#19. Just as the sentence contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a distinct episode; and as sentences should follow one another in harmonious sequence, so paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.
Winston Churchill
#20. The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
C.S. Lewis
#21. Begin where you are. Read every word, every phrase, every paragraph of the mind, as it operates through thought.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#22. Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that.
Steven Hall
#23. I'll get a three-page letter and the last paragraph says 'I know you'll never read this, but here's my number.' I love to call those people because the first thing they say is, 'Governor, I didn't mean everything I said in the letter about you.'
Dave Heineman
#24. The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.
Ezra Pound
#25. Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
Siri Hustvedt
#26. Happy are they whose pens fly across the page; I myself hesitate, I falter. I become angry and fearful. My drive diminishes as my taste improves. I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well proportioned paragraph.
Gustave Flaubert
#27. Whenever I write a paragraph in English, I first check it with the Google Translator, and most often it says no language detected.
M.F. Moonzajer
#28. Among all the sutras I have expounded,
Lotus Sutra is the first and foremost!
If you are able to uphold the Lotus Sutra,
it means you are able to uphold the body of a Buddha!
(LS 11: 3.35)
Lotus Sutra, Chapter 11, Section 3, Paragraph 35
Gautama Buddha
#29. And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.
Kurt Loder
#30. I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like.
Steven Amsterdam
#31. I like to try to do a little work before I do anything in the morning, even if it's a paragraph.
Sloane Crosley
#32. I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.
Aidan Chambers
#33. And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.
Harlan Coben
#34. The first paragraph of my book must get me my reader. The last paragraph of a chapter must compel my reader to turn the page. The last paragraph of my book must ensure that my reader looks out for my next book.
Ashwin Sanghi
#35. The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
Jorge Luis Borges
#36. There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.
Gertrude Stein
#37. I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now ... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
George Saunders
#38. Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It'll be time to start a Web site soon, where you'll type out everything in one huge paragraph.
David Wong
#39. I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.
Lynn Abbey
#40. Zaid's finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says that "the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more."
That's me! And you, probably! That's us!
Nick Hornby
#41. Not so bad this ending because one is getting used to endings: life like Morse, a series of dots and dashes, never forming a paragraph.
Graham Greene
#43. I count it a high honor to belong to a profession in which the good men write every paragraph, every sentence, every line, as lovingly as any Addison or Steele, and do so in full regard that by tomorrow it will have been burned, or used, if at all, to line a shelf.
Alexander Woollcott
#44. They found out about him in July and stayed angry all through August. They tried to kill him in September. It was way too soon. They weren't ready. The attempt was a failure. It could have been a disaster, but it was actually a miracle. Because nobody noticed.
Lee Child
#45. TURN THE PAGES, DIPPING IN HERE AND THERE, READING A PARAGRAPH OR TWO, SOMETIMES SEVERAL PAGES IN SEQUENCE, NEVER MORE THAN THAT.
Mortimer J. Adler
#46. No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#47. Each word... each paragraph... each page I write gets me one step closer to my dream.
Elizabeth Paradise
#48. In the opening paragraph Goldi commits felony breaking and entering. Why does she do it? Why does she risk five to ten in the slammer or death by bear claw?
Kendall Haven
#49. She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on the customer.
Cornell Woolrich
#50. I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
V.S. Naipaul
#51. If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four.
Susan Jacoby
#52. It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
Edward Gibbon
#53. What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.
Chaim Potok
#54. I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin.
Anne Tyler
#55. I like to think of the individual words, then you put the word in the sentence, then you have to think about what that word means in the sentence, then you have to read the sentence in the paragraph - you're sort of building up like that; that's my philosophy.
Ann Goldstein
#56. But you know how it is with fathers and sons. We can't say what we want to say. We think a nod is a paragraph and a sentence is a book, and, in the end, all that's important is left unspoken.
Peter Kirby
#57. Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.
Steven Pinker
#58. There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy.
Jorge Luis Borges
#59. Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, send your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tagline.
Paul O'Neill
#60. I read the last paragraph of my favorite book. I remind myself that some things I love end. And that's okay.
Ari Eastman
Ari Eastman
#61. We all imagine happy endings to such books, pick out the page, the paragraph, in which we would step in and pluck the innocents to safety.
Ada Palmer
#62. Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
Barrett Wendell
#63. They get the same rush from a well-executed trade that a writer finds in a well-turned paragraph - not because there's money in it, necessarily, but because it takes technical skill and some measure of creative thinking to pull off.
Anonymous
#64. The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn't is that you push through the parts where you know that you've just written seven pages when all you're looking for is one paragraph.
Anne Lamott
#65. What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph,
Phillip Lopate
#66. Life is too short to read books whose cleverness makes them impenetrable. A good book should keep you awake at night, flickering through pages as you promise yourself just one more chapter; they shouldn't put you to sleep as you tackle a paragraph for the fifth time.
Kate Morton
#67. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
William Strunk Jr.
#68. I'm following it perfectly. Although, if this were a novel, I'd take the trouble to reread the last paragraph as carefully as possible.
Cesar Aira
#69. I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.
Edan Lepucki
#70. Among all shravakas and pratyekabuddhas, bodhisattvas are the foremost. So is the Lotus Sutra; among all sutras, it is the foremost! Just as the Buddha is the King of the Law; so is the Lotus Sutra, it is the King of all Sutras!
(LS 23:2.16)
Lotus Sutra, Chapter 23, Section 2, Paragraph 16
Gautama Buddha
#71. In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.
Cynthia Ozick
#72. I write every paragraph four times - once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.
Margery Allingham
#73. Every day, I am thinking:
'How can I lead all living beings
to enter the unsurpassed way
so as to quickly acquire the body of a Buddha?
(LS 16: 3.23)
Lotus Sutra, Chapter 16, Section 3, Paragraph 23
Gautama Buddha
#74. There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it.
Charles Guggenheim
#75. she described in a separate paragraph the Haredi community, and how within it religious practice was a total way of life. The distinction between what was rendered to Caesar and what to God was meaningless, much as it was for observant Muslims.
Ian McEwan
#76. Like the one-sentence paragraph, the second-person point of view can also make us suspect that style is being used as a substitute for content.
Francine Prose
#77. Paymasters come in only two sizes: one sort shows you where the book says that you can't have what you've got coming to you; the second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don't rate it.
Robert A. Heinlein
#78. Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.
Elizabeth Strout
#79. With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity - voiceover, the camera's point of view, good acting - but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.
William Boyd
#80. I have such bad memories, sitting in the back of a classroom, being told, you know, everybody is going to read a paragraph, and skipping ahead to my paragraph and being mortified and trying to read it enough times so that I wouldn't stutter and stammer, getting called on, even in high school.
Vince Flynn
#81. When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.
C.S. Forester
#82. He had been slowing down, the way one, half asleep, continually rereads the same paragraph trying to find a connection between sentences.
Michael Ondaatje
#83. In my office I have a sign that says, 'Don't think. Just write!' and that's how I work. I try not to worry about each word, or even each sentence or paragraph. For me, stories evolve. Writing is a process. I rewrite each sentence, each manuscript, many times.
David A. Adler
#84. There was also the time that competitors were asked to submit a paragraph of a Graham Greene parody: Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and placed third.
Christopher Hitchens
#85. The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever
they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work.
Sid Fleischman
#86. If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.
James Patterson
#87. I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called 'The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,' and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session.
Irvin D. Yalom
#88. The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.
Dirk Bogarde
#89. Find something that thrills you, and when you finish reading it for enjoyment, read it again line by line, paragraph by paragraph to see what you liked about it.
W.P. Kinsella
#90. It's easy to write a sentence, paragraph, or book. What's difficult is writing the best sentence, paragraph, or book you can write.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#91. Do you believe in reincarnation?" I asked as we looked together at the intricate drawings, reading bits about them in the paragraph of text on each page. "I don't," he said. "I believe we're here once and what we do matters.
Cheryl Strayed
#92. To have submitted it to the legislative discretion of the States, would have been improper for the same reason; and for the additional reason that it would have rendered too dependent on the State governments that branch of the federal government which ought to be dependent on the people alone.
James Madison
#93. 1. Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic.
William Strunk Jr.
#94. How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms
Aristotle.
#95. No construction of thought represents a label, barrier, or a full stop. Each sentence, paragraph, and page represents an exploratory probe into the unknown; each statement is an act of experimentation, investigation, creation, and growth.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#96. A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph.
Dorothy Thompson
#97. I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right.
David Mitchell
#98. When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.
Billy Collins
#99. The whole of the Targum deserves study as shewing how textual ambiguity or corruption may combine with doctrinal prepossession to modify tradition;
Chapter II, Section 2, Paragraph 1171
Edwin A. Abbott
#100. LIFE IS NOT A PARAGRAPH. I think about the bundle of clothes on the side of the track and I feel as though my throat is closing up. Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis. EVENING
Paula Hawkins
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