Quotes About Long Sentences

#1. Every long sentence can be broken up into shorter ones, and if you don't know how - if you don't see within your long sentences groupings of simple, clear ideas - it will show.

June Casagrande

#2. Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

T. S. Eliot

#3. Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.

William Shenstone

#4. America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

Bruce Jackson

#5. I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

Jami Attenberg

#6. Long sentences, awkward constructions, and fuzzy-wuzzy words that seem to apologize for daring to venture an opinion are part of the price the law reviews pay for their precious dignity.

Fred Rodell

#7. I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.

John Burnside

#8. Forest! They seek your trees to sleep among,
With their long sentences hung. Forest!

Rainer Maria Rilke

#9. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#10. I've been lucky. I've met a lot of baseball people, and I've learned to value people who talk - people who talk well and in long sentences and even long paragraphs.

Roger Angell

#11. She wasn't stupid. She just didn't want to put her neuron power into long sentences.

Margaret Atwood

#12. In the long sentences of the president's message, semicolons followed by "yet" or "but" separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt's characteristic "on the one hand, on the other" style of crediting antagonistic views.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#13. I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.

Lydia Davis

#14. If Wells recognized any merit in [Henry] James, it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all. p. 516

Felix J. Palma

#15. The buildings line the canals like long sentences each house a word, each window a letter, each gap a punctuation.

David Levithan

#16. Slowly the darkness began to weave its way into my mind, and before long I was hopelessly out of control. I could not follow the path of my own thoughts. Sentences flew around in my head and fragmented first into phrases and then words; finally, only sounds remained.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#17. You know how some people write every day at a certain point? I'm not like that. I carry something around for a long time. I weigh the words and the sentences. I weigh the paragraphs. The process is much more meditative for me.

Jamaica Kincaid

#18. Lyndon Johnson's sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama.

Robert A. Caro

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

Matthew Henry

#20. When finished writing a post, go back and add bullets, sub heads, spacing; eliminate long paragraphs or sentences.

Michael Hyatt

#21. It's important to look ahead, I think, to shape your stuff for - again - effect. Because it's just so easy to write long, flowy sentences, get lost in them. The hard part's making them matter, making yourself make them matter.

Stephen Graham Jones

#22. I had a lot of trouble speaking as a kid. I didn't really speak in coherent sentences until I was, like, 6 years old. There was a long time where everybody was very worried, because my sisters were so advanced for their age, and I would barely talk.

Ronda Rousey

#23. Most people he knew, his wife included, wouldn't make it through an hour on the promise of four sentences. But Frankie Bard was like a camel. She could hold her words for days
as long as she could watch the goings-on.

Sarah Blake

#24. Good communication does not mean that you have to speak in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs. It isn't about slickness. Simple and clear go a long way.

John P. Kotter

#25. I was going to be in therapy for a long, long time. I wasn't even a sentence yet. But I had some syllables, some new sounds. The first halves of the sentences I was accumulating were solid. I trusted them.

Heather Sellers

#26. She let him finish her sentences for her for so long that now he starts them too.

David Mitchell

#27. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs ... The way I write is who I am, or have become ...

Joan Didion

#28. These letters, and then words, and then sentences, that are written on your manuscript are all answers to questions. Writing is nothing but a long journey of confronting questions. Accomplishment will bring you peace, but will not make a writer of you.

Rabisankar Bal

#29. I love being married. I was single for a long time, and I just got so sick of finishing my own sentences.

Brian Kiley

#30. There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#31. I think the best writers use the language they use every day when they talk to friends. When we talk to each other, we tend to talk in short grabs rather than in long flowing sentences. I think that's not a bad way to write.

Morris Gleitzman

#32. Some people write a thank you note for a gift, and it's three pages long, and some people write a thank you note, and it's five sentences - that's me. I like to pare away words because I don't want to waste anyone's time.

Bill Callahan

#33. I use "perpetrated" because it's the kind of word that passive-voice writers are fond of. They prefer long words of Latin origin to short Anglo-Saxon words - which compounds their trouble and makes their sentences still more glutinous. Short is better than long. Of the 701 words in

William Zinsser

#34. Think long thoughts in short sentences.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#35. 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

#36. People often say that when couples are married for a long time, they start to look alike. I don't believe that. But I do believe their sentences start to look alike.

David Levithan

#37. Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.

Miguel De Cervantes

#38. I've learnt something more. The expectation of a body can last as long as any hope. Like mine expecting yours. As soon as they gave you two life sentences, I stopped believing in their time.

John Berger

#39. There's shorthand that happens when you work with someone you know where you can almost finish each other's sentences. There's just a certain back and forth that becomes much easier with someone you've worked with for so long.

Joe Lo Truglio

#40. There was something in the music of the accent that Douglass liked: it was as if the Cork people put long lazy hammocks in their sentences.

Colum McCann