Sentence Before Quotes

#1. Hope is nice. Fucking useless in this situation, but still nice. You have one sentence before you start bleeding. Make it good.

Lauren Stewart

#2. Are you coming?" Aunt Bette said from the other side of the door. "No, I - " Already came. I stopped myself mid-sentence before I blurted it out.

C.D. Reiss

#3. Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending.

David Bayles

#4. Good God. I don't believe St. Vincent and the word 'celibacy' have ever been mentioned in the same sentence before.

Lisa Kleypas

#5. I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.

Chang-rae Lee

#6. I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found. I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.

Howard Dean

#7. Valek: You know a death sentence hasn't kept us apart before.
Yelena: Is that an order Valek?
Valek: No, it's a promise!

Maria V. Snyder

#8. Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the nest day - that way, you can write three or five words without being "creative" and before you know it, you're writing.

Cory Doctorow

#9. I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.

Anna Quindlen

#10. Snowman wakes before dawn.

Margaret Atwood

#11. On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#12. I find it helpful when I stop for the day to leave the last sentence unfinished or the last paragraph only lightly sketched out, so that when I start again I can pick up where I left off the day before.

Julia Bell

#13. I don't ..." She was about to tell him that she didn't understand, but stopped before she finished the sentence. There was nothing to understand - not now. She could mull over everything later, when she was safe.

Nora Ash

#14. I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.

Rick Bass

#15. I start with voice, maybe a sentence. That sentence might embody an image, and I go from there. One sentence to the next. Sound drives the work these days - sound before description.

Paul Lisicky

#16. I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.

Simone De Beauvoir

#17. Sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.

Rebecca West

#18. Before you can write a single sentence, you must first create an entire world to support it.

Adam Santo

#19. I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.

Karen Thompson Walker

#20. This was it. Together. Forever. As we left it all behind, the sun warmed my back, lighting the way before us. I knew of no better omen.

Becca Fitzpatrick

#21. The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses,

Margaret Atwood

#22. They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me.

Lauren Oliver

#23. The act of you leaving was just the full stop at the end of a terrible sentence. Fact is, I lost you long before you ever left.

Beau Taplin

#24. The days rolled by in the camp - they were over before you could say "knife." But the years, they never rolled by; they never moved by a second.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#25. You must sit down to speak this language,
It is so heavy you can't be polite or chatter in it.
For once you have begun a sentence, the whole course of your life is laid out before you"
-quoted in "The Geography of Bliss

Bill Holm

#26. She read with an eagerness which hardly left her power of comprehension, and from impatience of knowing what the next sentence might bring, was incapable of attending to the sense of the one before her eyes.

Jane Austen

#27. Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#28. Before going home with a guy, give him a blow job. Guys are always more relaxed after a blow job. (You're totally welcome, guys. P.S. Girls can't see this sentence!!!!!)

Eugene Mirman

#29. I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I'm reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it's worth the effort.

Philip Schultz

#30. You shouldn't start a sentence with 'however' unless you have a sentence stating something appropriate before, which would be the thing you're howevering. It's not grammatical. I should cut you.

Lotus Rose

#31. 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

#32. No one dared do it before, not in front of the King (opening sentence)

Gordon Thomas

#33. Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

#34. I was 40 before I learned that 'No' was a complete sentence.

Kathy Ireland

#35. There was absolutely zero discourse between me or anybody at the studio with the NFL. None. The only exchange was one-sentence e-mails trying to arrange a meeting, before deciding to cancel the meeting. Period. End of story.

Peter Landesman

#36. I am slow. A sentence often takes an hour to compose before I throw it out. What can you do?

Edith Pearlman

#37. If you leave me naked and waiting on the bed without making love to me, I'll - " I didn't get to finish the threat. I think it was the word "naked," though maybe it was "bed," but before I finished my sentence, he was on me. Mercy to Adam

Patricia Briggs

#38. If he went over the falls now, he might get to the bottom before they did.
That wasn't a good sentence, however he tried it.

Terry Pratchett

#39. An hour and forty-five minutes before Nazneen's life began-began as it would proceed for quite some time, that is to say uncertainly-her mother, Rupban, felt an iron fist squeeze her belly.

Monica Ali

#40. Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.

Richard Hugo

#41. The night before I left my mother, I wrote a letter.

Esmeralda Santiago

#42. And this is where I'll end, before I know what happens next.

Shannon Hale

#43. I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come.

V.S. Naipaul

#44. Forever ... ' he smiled at me, expectant, knowing I knew the end of the ominous sentence. I grinned and waited a whole minute before responding ' ... and always'.

Mercy Cortez

#45. Before you finish that sentence, I want you to think about what a promise from me costs and what you're willing to pay for it.

Leigh Bardugo

#46. You can't bribe me with pie." Before he'd finished the sentence, his stomach grumbled loudly in a plea for the pie.
The men grinned.
"We all know you're a pie ho," Mr. Elroy said.

Jill Shalvis

#47. You and I are so different: I am one word at a time one foot in front of the other, slowly, always testing how surely footing is before proceeding to the next sentence with ruminative breaks for buttered toast and coffee.

Carlene Bauer

#48. Emily swore and he was impressed; he'd never thought to string cocksuckingsonofabitch together in one sentence. He couldn't help himself; the snort of laughter escaped before he could hold it in.

C.H. Admirand

#49. The next-to-last sentence that the Buddha is reported to have spoken as he was dying, before his final sentence of encouragement to his community, was Transient are all conditioned things.

Sylvia Boorstein

#50. I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.

Neil Gaiman

#51. Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with "but." If that's what you learned, unlearn it - there's no stronger word at the start. It announces a total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.

William Zinsser

#52. Faced with the sentence therapistsneedspecialtreatment we need to know if this is a text about sex crimes or about speech pathology before we can correctly read it aloud.

David Crystal