Top 100 Sentence Quotes
#1. You will taste a way of life profoundly nourishing and from your tongue may spring a song or poem or sentence or word or maybe nothing but silence. Silence only the heart can turn to song.
Emily Saliers
#2. Just start the sentence ... and see what happens. This is how we write.
Jincy Willett
#3. She took a long breath in at the end of her sentence, feeling her voice break and knowing she was at the end of her emotional rope. She didn't want to run off the rails, and plow into Caleb
Shyloh Morgan
#4. I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence.
Lynne Tillman
#5. It was the building from the drawing in my brain.
And if you don't think that's a weird sentence, maybe you should reread it.
James Patterson
#6. When we're rational about rule-breaking we set a limit. You don't get 30 years in prison for a traffic ticket. But sometimes you sentence yourself to months or years of emotional pain over minor offenses.
David D. Burns
#7. You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
Gore Vidal
#8. Harper said, "But Snuffleupagus was real."
"That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that.
Joe Hill
#9. I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.
Gillian Flynn
#10. That's why even the simplest, most basic Japanese sentence cannot be translated into English!
Tae Kim
#11. If in an actor there appears an utter vacancy of meaning, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, a torpid apathy, the greatest kindness that can be shown him is a speedy sentence of expulsion.
Samuel Johnson
#12. You hear the word 'cancer,' and you think it is a death sentence. In fact, the shock is the biggest thing about a diagnosis of cancer.
Clare Balding
#13. Be as vigilantly on guard against translating such a sentence into the passive voice as you would against committing murder.
Jay Rubin
#14. It's been so long now and so much has happened that I am able now to look back with much less emotion and my take on Andy as an artist now comes down to a simple sentence: he made religious art for a secular society which is why it has so much appeal.
Bob Colacello
#15. Funny how any sentence that started with "honestly" usually wasn't.
Jay Bell
#16. Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.
John Casey
#17. I like to write. I like to choose the right word, I like to write the right sentence. It's just like gardening or something. You put the seed into the soil at the right time, in the right place.
Haruki Murakami
#18. Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.
Elias Canetti
#19. There must be a punitive expedition against the Jews in Russia, a punitive expedition which will expect: death sentence and execution. Then the world will see the end of the Jews is also the end of Bolshevism.
Julius Streicher
#20. I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.
Amy Hempel
#21. My Lord, it is a very hard sentence. For my part, I am the innocentest person of them all, only I have been sworn against by perjured persons.
William Kidd
#22. It may just be a little sentence from the little girl, but what matters is that she had done it; why can't I?
Low Kay Hwa
#23. Any sentence that combined "I love you" and "but" could not be good.
Lauren Myracle
#24. The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn't make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention.
Richard Dawkins
#25. When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker
#26. With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author's soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work.
Andre Aciman
#27. I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence-because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again.
Tracy Kidder
#28. I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject.
Albert Camus
#29. but that coldness stopped up the sentence in my mouth. "What
Zadie Smith
#30. We don't have any real justice in the legal system, you never see a headline that reads, Millionaire Gets Death Sentence.
Garrison Wynn
#31. Big can be beautiful - just not to me. I find you disgusting; freshmen 15 is not a life sentence.
Daniel Tosh
#32. It's funny,' I noted in the diary, 'how often I seem to build a story around one sentence, nearly always the last one, too. The themes are a bit depressing but I just can't get rid of that.
Daphne Du Maurier
#33. Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he ... " This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him."
Quentin Crisp
#34. If you want to fulfil your dreams, stay away from the people who look down on you. Those who try to finish every single sentence for you. Those people are called dream killers.
Euginia Herlihy
#35. If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension ... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#36. I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.
Louis Begley
#38. We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together.
Herbert Spencer
#39. A sentence well couched takes both the sense and understanding. I love not those cart-rope speeches that are longer than the memory of man can fathom.
Owen Feltham
#40. Look directly into every mirror. Realize our reflection is the first sentence to a story, and our story starts: We were here.
Shane Koyczan
#41. I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.'
Jess Walter
#42. Constructing a strong and beautiful sentence is the highest form of architecture. Because whereupon seeing a beautiful building one may think, but to read a sentence one has to think.
Garry Fitchett
#43. I'm flattered if any movie role and my name are mentioned in the same sentence, because there haven't been a ton of them.
Stephen Amell
#44. My father can not finish a sentence. When we were kids he would go, 'Girls the most important thing in life to remember is ... ' 'Daddy, what is it?' 'What's what, honey?' 'The most important thing in life to remember.' 'Oh, what's that?'
Caroline Rhea
#45. Every sentence must do one of two things: reveal character or advance the action.
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd.
Zoltan Istvan
#47. one sentence seemed to change a man, and the world seemed to change, one man at a time.
Jung-Myung Lee
#48. My goal one day is to be in the same sentence as Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall. If I can match them for 10 years, I'd be in their company. They were class acts. That's what I'd like to be.
Pete Sampras
#49. You call my Wall Street words "cuss words" ... I call them "sentence enhancers".
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#50. Graham's wonderful sentence as, an investor needs only two things: cash and courage. Having only one of them is not enough.
Seth Klarman
#51. Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you'd expect of a psychopath.
Jon Ronson
#52. Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words akind of blood must circulate forever.
Henry David Thoreau
#53. Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.
Lionel Trilling
#54. It seems to me like a failure of language that experience fits into a regular sentence made up of ordinary words. It fits into one word. "Experience.
Ann Brashares
#56. In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
Amy Tan
#57. Her outflung hand turned over in the air. The gesture it described was infinitesimal, but it made Corrie draw in his breath and for the first time consider the possibility that perhaps the final emotion he might feel for his wife was hate. -Life Sentence
Rebecca West
#58. He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man's child sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#59. 'See Spot run!' is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.
Greg Iles
#60. The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.
Noam Chomsky
#61. For example, there is an old grammarian's saw about how a sentence can end in five prepositions. Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior's bedroom to read him a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?
Steven Pinker
#62. No matter how wonderful a sentence is, if it doesn't add new and useful information, it should be removed.
Kurt Vonnegut
#63. What mattered to Abu was the music of the sentence. 'A shadow does not belong to the object that casts it.' To Abu, it was a little poem. And in general, it was the poetics, the music of things that tossed his confetti.
Tom Robbins
#64. The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.
Bill Bryson
#65. There's one problem with California." I wasn't eager to listen, but the sentence had a promising beginning. "It has no understanding of evil.
Pico Iyer
#66. Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation
Malcolm Gladwell
#67. Rabo Karabekian: I'm in the middle of a sentence.
Circe Berman: Who isn't?.
Kurt Vonnegut
#68. Most authors have one idea per book. Shakespeare had two per sentence.
Lauren Hutton
#69. She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.
Peter Carey
#70. There's U and I in universe! Uni = One, Verse = Spoken Sentence, so one spoken sentence created you and I!
Reed Abbitt Moore
#71. Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.
Peter Straub
#72. A building is not a sentence, which in principle has the ability to match and express a thought closely. It is not linear, like language. Compared to the fluidity of words, a building is atrociously clumsy, but it can be lived and inhabited as books cannot be.
Rowan Moore
#73. Interviews make me so nervous - I can't get a sentence out of my mouth.
Lara Stone
#74. Karma is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words that authors can arrange as she chooses.
Sara Gran
#75. He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]
Deborah Kerr
#76. There is not a sentence in the world that could respectfully do justice to the life and music of Jerry Garcia.
Branford Marsalis
#77. There may be a lot of things I'm not good at, thought Vimes, but at least I don't treat the punctuation of a sentence like a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey ...
Terry Pratchett
#78. There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I'm alone and trying to solve a sentence. It's exciting, even when it's frustrating, even when I can't do it right.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#79. I wanted someone, somewhere, whom I might never meet, to read a sentence I wrote and think, I thought I was the only one who felt that way.
Lauren DeStefano
#80. My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.
Jeanette Winterson
#81. You only get married the first time once. There was the philosophy of a generation wrapped up in a tidy little sentence
Carrie Vaughn
#82. It took me ten minutes to write this very sentence. I'm no writer. This is not my calling.
Macaulay Culkin
#83. Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my "sentence" without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.
Peter De Vries
#84. I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#85. I miss dogs, man. I always had a family pet, always had a dog growing up. It was almost equivalent to the prison sentence, having something taken away from me for three years. I want a dog just for the sake of my kids, but also me. I miss my companions.
Michael Vick
#86. The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. It is the most grievous sentence of the three, but it overflows with comfort. Strange is it that where misery was concentrated mercy reigned; where sorrow reached her climax weary souls find rest.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#87. He means the Word: the sentence that, when uttered, would destroy the mind of the listener.
Ted Chiang
#88. It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
Soren Kierkegaard
#89. 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
#90. Ending a sentence with yo, is like saying, I don't want a job. Not today. Not ever. Know what I mean yo?
Dov Davidoff
#91. Artistically, I find jokes really satisfying aesthetically, because there's something great about getting an idea down to a sentence or two.
Demetri Martin
#92. Sometimes this sentence "I am praying for you" can be so dishonest and lowering that there are occasions I have looked up in heaven and asked God, "please don't accept that prayer".
Gloria D. Gonsalves
#93. I don't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with Charles Chaplin.
Stan Laurel
#94. By the second sentence of a pitch, the entirety of the story should be explained.
Michael Hastings
#95. Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?
Jackson Browne
#96. The sentence is the great invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.
John Banville
#97. Another deserted sentence. Another side effect of death. Words go AWOL.
Daisy Whitney
#98. Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself.
Joseph Joubert
#99. The sentence of the first murderer was pronounced by the Supreme Judge of the universe. Was it death? No, it was life. 'A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth'; and 'Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#100. And yet, on balance, affirmative action has, I think, been a qualified success." A 13-word sentence with five hedging words. I give it first prize as the most wishy-washy sentence in modern public discourse,
William Zinsser
