Quotes About Sentences

#1. You're going the right direction. No one does anything perfectly the first time. It's going to be okay. No one could have said anything better to me in that instant. Those three simple sentences set my soul at ease.

Jamie McGuire

#2. Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do

William Zinsser

#3. For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible...

Rebecca Solnit

#4. It's always nice to end your sentences with an exclamation mark, and not a comma.

Joey Santiago

#5. In 1998, while serving two consecutive life sentences, Puente began corresponding with a writer named Shane Bugbee and sending him recipes which were subsequently published in a book called Cooking with a Serial Killer.
Call me crazy, but I wouldn't touch that food with a ten-foot pole.

Jodi Picoult

#6. 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

#7. But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.

Polly Toynbee

#8. That American Taliban kid Johnny Walker was indicted today. Ten counts of terrorism. He could get 5 life sentences. In Taliban terms, that's 360 virgins.

Jay Leno

#9. These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.

Potter Stewart

#10. I really don't write much anymore, and I'm not uncomfortable with that. I've tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don't want to go on.

Lawrence Block

#11. Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?

David Mitchell

#12. 'Getting smart on crime' does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.

Kamala Harris

#13. The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

George Saunders

#14. I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences.

Gary Soto

#15. People in America and Hollywood are very good at pronouncing my name, to begin with. Socially, they're very adept at listening to somebody's name and repeating it, cleverly in the first couple of sentences so the name sticks to begin with.

Ioan Gruffudd

#16. I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset it would be charming.

Jane Austen

#17. Exactly,' the queen said. 'I've been where you are, and I know how difficult it is. You second guess the things you do; you second guess everything he does. You wonder over every conversation, trying to read into the breaths between sentences. It's exhausting.

Kiera Cass

#18. I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that's not really a Scott thing. It's pretty classic grab-the-reader technique.

Scott Westerfeld

#19. 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

#20. When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

Nicholson Baker

#21. Slowly, slowly, I accumulate sentences. I have no idea what I'm doing until suddenly it reveals itself, almost done.

Sarah Manguso

#22. He did an excellent Tarik impression, bringing his voice low and softly accenting the ends of his sentences. Scrubber, his raccoon, flailed and squirmed on the ground, pretending to be Monte himself. It was a light moment in the

Eliot Schrefer

#23. Sound waves do not die out. They travel forever and forever. All our sentences are immortal. Our useless bleatings circle the universe for all eternity.

Fay Weldon

#24. I think writing is a part-time career, because otherwise you get a little stale, maybe even self-indulgent, when you have to fill the hours with sentences. I don't think, if I wrote 12 hours a day, my work would be much better.

Cynthia Voigt

#25. A key problem for Islam today can be summarized in three simplifying sentences: Christians worship a man made divine. Jews worship a book. And Muslims worship both.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#26. There are some sentences you cannot see yourself ever writing. 'I heartily endorse the Conservative Party' would be one. 'I look forward to Justin Bieber's new record' would be another.

John Niven

#27. The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

Colm Toibin

#28. Despite his evasiveness and his determination to hew to a single message, Jobs was a vivid presence. The intensity of his self-confidence made me hang on his every word. He spoke in carefully constructed sentences, even when trying to answer an unexpected question.

Brent Schlender

#29. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

William James

#30. We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words
and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)

Thomas Newkirk

#31. Hold on there, pal. Why don't you take a deep breath and tell me what you know. And keep in mind most of us prefer sentences over stream-of-consciousness word vomit.

Alex P. Berg

#32. As I sat in a small room constructing what seemed to me awkward sentences and paragraphs, McCone was out having exciting adventures.

Marcia Muller

#33. I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.

Martin Amis

#34. I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Karen Thompson Walker

#35. 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

#36. Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

Sylvia Plath

#37. Something's going to happen that's going to make us all pay attention at the type of sentences some people are serving and the conditions in which they are served.

Christopher Darden

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

Richelle E. Goodrich

#39. Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

Ernest Hemingway,

#40. I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.

Adam Ross

#41. In Washington, I found myself as a 31-year-old in a room with the president, vice president, and secretaries of state and defense, and I was unfazed by it. But get me around a rock star I grew up with and I have trouble completing sentences.

Joe Scarborough

#42. But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.

Virginia Woolf

#43. conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.

Lily King

#44. The single most important lesson of effective communication is this: Focus on clarity. Concentrate on precisions. Don't worry about constructing beautiful sentences. Beauty comes from meaning, not language. Accuracy is the most effective style of all.

David Gerrold

#45. I reiterate my proposal of creating life sentences for politicians who make deals with organized criminals. They deserve the maximum penalty because a politician that makes deals with criminals - I've said it, and I repeat it - is no longer a politician but just another 'capo.'

Josefina Vazquez Mota

#46. I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine, and disease in the decades ahead.

Mark Lynas

#47. Her fingers walk the tightropes of sentences;

Anthony Doerr

#48. Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.

Jonathan Sacks

#49. Let other people finish their sentences when they're talking.

Randy Pausch

#50. I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

Michael Ondaatje

#51. Writers are b*tc*ing about 140 characters. If you can't make a point in two sentences, how good is that book of yours really going to be?
Taken from Twitter Titters Volume 1 edited by John Rice

A.W. Tozer

#52. Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.

Bonnie Friedman

#53. All truth has to be expressed in sentences ... the type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning.

Ernest Fenollosa

#54. He had a particularly deliberate way of speaking that made him sound as if he had thought up his sentences several minutes ago and was only now getting around to saying them.

Charles Baxter

#55. That's how you have to read this book, you see. You wade through a few sentences, then stop and think about them, then wade through a few more.

Susanna Kearsley

#56. 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

#57. sum up Casablanca in just four clipped, declarative sentences: "Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back again. Boy gives up girl for humanity's sake.

Noah Isenberg

#58. Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences.

Martin Amis

#59. This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don't jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.

Sarah Dessen

#60. Not until she'd left the room did Kate realize that Bunny hadn't ended a single one of her sentences with a question mark.

Anne Tyler

#61. I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.

George Saunders

#62. Write a word
Put several words together to make a sentence
Put several sentences together to make a paragraph
Put enough paragraphs together and you have a story.

D.B. Macks

#63. SENTENCES OF THE KHAJAGAN
RUDBARI : Heart to heart is an essential means of passing on the secrets of the Path.

Idries Shah

#64. Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

Stephen King

#65. One of the saddest sentences I know is "I wish I had asked my mother about that." Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.

William Zinsser

#66. Enter my first neighbor - a woman who spoke in complete, coherent sentences, who ate with a knife and fork and who only cried at weddings. I couldn't help myself. In a dramatic gesture, I bolted the door and threw my body across it to prevent her exit. She understood.

Erma Bombeck

#67. Books don't change people; paragraphs do, Sometimes even sentences.

John Piper

#68. When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.

E.L. Doctorow

#69. I think in reading a few sentences of text you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers.

Lauren Mayberry

#70. It's fascinating. You know all these words, and they're all English, but when you string them together into sentences, they just don't make any sense.

Cassandra Clare

#71. I'm very bad at ending sentences. A lot times I just want to say, 'That's the end of my sentence. I have nothing more to say.'

Nathan Fielder

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

Rainer Maria Rilke

#73. Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#74. The federal sentencing guidelines should be revised downward. By contrast to the guidelines, I can accept neither the necessity nor the wisdom of federal mandatory minimum sentences. In too many cases, mandatory minimum sentences are unwise and unjust.

Anthony Kennedy

#75. As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don't know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).

Fernando Pessoa

#76. Breezy journalistic sentences about wealthy white people unaware that other human beings are real became the rubber stamp product of the elite MFA programs.

Sarah Schulman

#77. The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.

Edward Hirsch

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

David Levithan

#79. 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

#80. A passion-driven exultant man sings out
Sentences that he has never thought ...

William Butler Yeats

#81. Reading aloud is different from just following sentences with your eyes. Something quite unexpected wells up in your mind, a kind of indefinable resonance that I find impossible to resist.

Haruki Murakami

#82. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work.

Joseph Joubert

#83. What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

Richard Powers

#84. I like to believe that if you pay close attention to the sentences as they unfold, they will draw you in rather than pushing you away.

Damon Galgut

#85. I don't know if it becomes literature ... I just know the two added words cause me to look at the ordinary sentences differently. And quite honestly, I find that to be magical!

Camron Wright

#86. Stop using sentences in your material world that reflect what it is you do not want to be.

Wayne Dyer

#87. I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.

William H Gass

#88. I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.

Roy Blount Jr.

#89. I hate two kinds of sentences you hear in workshops, the ones beginning "I really like ... " and the ones beginning "My problem with this poem is ... "

Denis Johnson

#90. Word-carpentry is like any other kind of carpentry: you must join your sentences smoothly.

Anatole France

#91. Lots of people hate gay people. You can tell who they are because they start sentences with, "It's not like I hate gay people."

Ali Liebegott

#92. Except in expert hands, stats can get in the way of story; an array of data that might better be presented in a table instead clogs up sentences.

John Thorn

#93. The therapist, he thought, and it bothered him a lot more than it should have. After all, he had nothing permanent with Sophie. He just needed to touch her on a semiregular basis or he couldn't finish his sentences.

Jennifer Crusie

#94. When faced with something complex, spend the time to think about some structure, write down sentences, think about it some more, and then share it.

Steven Sinofsky

#95. My life was being planned in sentences that started with 'We' instead of 'I', yet it felt like the most natural transition in the world.

Heather Demetrios

#96. If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.

William Zinsser

#97. I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

Anne Enright

#98. What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Joan Didion

#99. If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place.

Albert Ellis

#100. It's quite literally true that we are star dust, in the highest exalted way one can use that phrase ... I bask in the majesty of the cosmos. I use words, compose sentences that sound like the sentences I hear out of people that had revelation of Jesus, who go on their pilgrimages to Mecca.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson