Top 100 Quotes About Sentences
#1. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.
Lily King
#3. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#4. The Lord gave, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.' We repeated the holy sentences of resignation; but it was not resignation, it was despair that subdued the violence of our grief.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
#5. I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.
Don DeLillo
#6. I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.
Roger Zelazny
#7. In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.
Henry David Thoreau
#8. Trying to get the sentences right and the structure of the narration right is about as big a job as I can handle. But I also know that if you handle that job properly, everything else just clicks into place.
Bob Shacochis
#9. If it shall be necessary, through sentences of excommunication against their persons and of interdict against their lands, all backsliding being put an end to, they compel them to fulfil their vows.
Pope Innocent III
#10. The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.
Stanley Fish
#11. It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don't just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.
Anton Chekhov
#12. I came to Los Angeles for the first time in 1994. I spoke no English. I only knew how to say two sentences: 'How are you?' and 'I want to work with Johnny Depp.'
Penelope Cruz
#13. Self-confidence can be defined in two sentences. (1) I trust myself to face life's challenges and (2) I trust myself to follow my dreams and goals.
Gudjon Bergmann
#14. People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.
Richard Mitchell
#15. The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken firmly and conclusively,as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned.
Henry David Thoreau
#16. Precepts are the rules by which we ought to square our lives. When they are contracted into sentences, they strike the affections; whereas admonition is only blowing of the coal.
Seneca The Younger
#17. When my cousin Anil-da started telling us what he'd heard at the market about the groom's family, at my aunt Moina-pehi's wedding in January 2002, his eyes shone like inky marbles reflecting sunlight.
Aruni Kashyap
#18. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#19. We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#20. He loved to read. He loved words, the way they string together into sentences and stories. He wanted to study them, to know and create them, to share them with the world.
Sarah Ockler
#21. Positive thinkers use sentences like "I can do it"; "I am qualified for it"; they think of things as possible.
Israelmore Ayivor
#22. Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,
a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.
Henry David Thoreau
#23. I was 40 before I learned that 'No' was a complete sentence.
Kathy Ireland
#24. Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?
Edgar Degas
#25. The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know.
Muriel Barbery
#26. Then my outrage wandered away: never do junk if you need to finish thoughts, sentences, or simple tasks.
Lynn Crosbie
#27. There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.
Patrice Nganang
#28. Vocabulary and coherent sentences can't be downloaded onto paper unless they've first been uploaded to the head - by reading.
Jim Trelease
#29. 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
#31. When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had "capitalism" as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice.
Roger Scruton
#32. I always look for a "rhythm" in my writing. A cadence to the sentences. Sometimes I think of pieces I write in a song writing infrastructure - i.e., a verse, a chorus that I return to, a bridge that's something differenct, a chorus that I return to.
Mitch Albom
#33. The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences.
Markus Zusak
#34. No diplomatic intervention will ever be made by any government that I lead in support of any individual terrorist's life. We have only indicated in the past, and will maintain a policy in the future, of intervening diplomatically in support of Australian nationals who face capital sentences abroad.
Kevin Rudd
#35. Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
Joan Didion
#36. I don't find myself interesting as a person and the details I find boring, quite frankly. You could sum it up in a few words or sentences really: came from nothing. Self-educated. Luck. Energy. Curiosity. Ambition. That's it. Nothing at all can illuminate the work as far as I can tell.
Peter Ackroyd
#37. I am slow. A sentence often takes an hour to compose before I throw it out. What can you do?
Edith Pearlman
#38. I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together; that I, having tasted the sweetenes, l may the lesse perceave the bitternes of this miserable life.
Elizabeth I
#39. I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.
Larry Wall
#40. There is no one way to render an idea. Let's explore how masters of the sentence play with length and style to make their sentences distinctive.
Constance Hale
#41. Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.
Henry Sweet
#42. I believe there's no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal mother of sciences.
Miguel De Cervantes
#43. Sentences I never thought I would write. (1) That John Prescott certainly has a way with the ladies. (2) Give it to Steve McClaren, he seems like the man for the England job. (3) Peter Crouch is the man to replace Rooney.
Martin Samuel
#44. Abby: In another life, I could love you.
Travis: I might love you you in this one.
Jamie McGuire
#45. A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#46. I am made of words. Cut me & I bleed sentences. Read me, & I speak to your soul.
Chloe Thurlow
#47. There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn't one.
Scott Berkun
#48. Motherfuckers will read a book that's one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we're taking over.
Junot Diaz
#49. Another of Shantideva's wise sentences rang in Chongan's mind: "May those whose hell it is to hate and hurt be turned into lovers bringing flowers." Chongan imagined that the remains of Shantideva's holy ribs could transform Satan rather than vice versa.
Katerina Sestakova Novotna
#50. True love was a language, so many looks, touches and one word references that told the other more than full sentences of paragraphs, more than full outpourings of speech.
Our language was extensive and beautiful, and over a joyful lifetime together, we stayed fluent in it.
R.K. Lilley
#51. TEXAN: "Where are you from?" HARVARD STUDENT: "I am from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions." TEXAN: "OK, where are you from, jackass?" - Variation on an old joke
Ammon Shea
#52. The Internet lets women use words, which is their natural tool. Little girls speak in more complex, grammatical sentences than little boys do, and women never lose that superiority in verbal ability.
Helen Fisher
#53. 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
#54. Notoriously outspoken, his sentences always punctuated with profanities, General George S. Patton was the epitome of what a leader should be like - or so he thought. Patton believed a leader should look and act tough, so he cultivated his image and his personality to match his philosophy.
Simon Sinek
#55. I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.
Tom Robbins
#56. Grammar is what gives sense to language ... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.
David Crystal
#57. No longer in print ... There are sentences, and phrases that, in all their simplicity, say much more than they seem to at first: two months to live, never heard of it, dead on arrival ... For a writer, no longer in print must fall somewhere in that category.
Herman Koch
#58. Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.
Stanley Fish
#59. Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.
Richard Ford
#60. A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.
James Patterson
#61. When you know you love someone, when you know it's finally the right time, you don't just wait around for the right words, you just say the sentences even if they're all mixed up and imperfect.
Patti Callahan Henry
#62. I write most of my stories the way people talk, complete with an occasional run-on sentences and stuff that seems to go around in a few circles before making its point. In a comedy, you can do that.
Dan Alatorre
#64. Liberals are people who think that being tough on crime means longer suspended sentences.
Ronald Reagan
#65. 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
#66. The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.
John Wesley Powell
#67. There are so many ways of saying Hi. Hiss it, trill it, bark it, sing it, bellow it, laugh it, cough it. A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head, decisions galore.
Frank McCourt
#68. But music only exists because the pauses exist, and sentences only exist because the blank spaces exist.
Paulo Coelho
#70. My stand-up is more like how I am in real life. I don't really do a character thing in stand-up. It's just a bunch of sentences that are supposed to be funny.
Zach Galifianakis
#71. When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit!
Robert McKee
#72. Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.
William Kingdon Clifford
#73. I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.
Jennifer Donnelly
#74. Now I'm thinking about letters, the molecules of sentences and songs, the bricks of words.
Paul Tremblay
#75. A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.
Tom Robbins
#76. She spoke with the usual cadences of the young: sentences curling upward at the end, all statements fading into a smoky, implied question mark, as though nothing could be said with any reasonable certainty.
Laura Kalpakian
#77. From her perch more than a kilometer aboveground, she surveys the city that never sleeps, glittering and coruscating in the rain like a metaphor for her glamorous life.
Bao Shu
#78. No good sentences ever include the word 'should.' I should have paid the tavern bill; now they're coming to break my legs. I should never have run off with my best friend's wife; now she devils me constantly. I should -
Cassandra Clare
#79. But still, it looked completely natural, as if we had been kissing at the ends of sentences for ages, while the rest of the world was still hung up on punctuation.
Jodi Picoult
#80. 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
#81. If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.
Eric Hoffer
#82. 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
#83. An aphorism is a single sentence that totally exhausts its subject.
Robert Breault
#84. Sometimes I think that I want to do something strictly basic, really simple. Just with a few chords. But I won't have anything more than two or three sentences in my head. That kind of evaporates once I start playing and then it goes off in whatever direction.
Tom Jenkinson
#85. During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.
John Adams
#86. Effective listening is more than simply avoiding the bad habit of interrupting others while they are speaking or finishing their sentences. It's being content to listen to the entire thought of someone rather than waiting impatiently for your chance to respond.
Richard Carlson
#87. If it seems like he's going to die she'll call for me. This is how we talk. In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they're going to end. So
Daniel Wallace
#88. I'm suddenly worried people will think that I believe their religion can be summed up on four sex-obsessed sentences.
Ryan North
#89. Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film.
William Gibson
#90. I am made of words. When you cut me, I bleed sentences. When you read me, I speak to your soul.
Chloe Thurlow
#91. Sentences are trenches you can take cover in. They are not wildly comfortable. They are not bulletproof. But they can give you the illusion of safety.
Meg Howrey
#92. If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.
Sam Altman
#93. Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.
Stanley Fish
#94. I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.
Tom Drury
#95. When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'll have a book.
Betsy Byars
#96. Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.
William H Gass
#97. As a writer, you look for someplace to start. Once you have a beginning and you've written the first two sentences, nothing else will ever change it.
Ronee Blakley
#98. Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.
James Patterson
#99. Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?
Stanley Fish
#100. 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
