Sentences For Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Among other harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack - associated with blacks - than powder cocaine, associated with whites.

Michelle Alexander

#3. We are not prepared to consider special category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. Crime is crime is crime, it is not political

Margaret Thatcher

#4. Senescent judges show how patriotic they are by passing out hard sentences for tearing up a draft card or following one's conscience according to the principles established by our country at the Nuremburg trials.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

#5. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

William Strunk Jr.

#6. Keep your mouth shut and see what's happening around you. Don't finish people's sentences for them. Don't just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they're saying it. That was great training for writing.

Amy Bloom

#7. Many of the sisters were Black and poor and from D.C., where every crime is a violation of a federal statute. They were beautiful sisters, serving outrageous sentences for minor offenses.

Assata Shakur

#8. 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

#9. She's a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck ... she's outta this world ... she's bold, inventive and fearless. That's who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.

Tom Waits

#10. Eliminating the death penalty ... will not hinder the prosecutorial capacity to seek, or the court's ability to impose, 'life without parole' sentences for serious, heinous crimes and criminals.

Scott Harshbarger

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

David Mitchell

#12. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are the prime reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to over 2.5 million people, a nearly 300% increase. We now lock up one out of every hundred adults, far more than any other country.

Piper Kerman

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. Positive thinkers use sentences like "I can do it"; "I am qualified for it"; they think of things as possible.

Israelmore Ayivor

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other forms of writing but not for dialogue. Another mistake is speechifying. Three sentences at a time is tops, yet many beginners write speeches that go on and on.

Sol Stein

#24. When you're on a submarine you're usually underwater for months at a time, and you don't get to Skype or make phone calls. When you get messages, they're maybe two sentences. They're very short.

Jessy Schram

#25. I don't understand how an adult can write those last two sentences and not want to kill themselves for being so despicable.

Harvey Pekar

#26. Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#27. At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger's consulting room at the Sunny Isles Geriatric Clinic with my father, who was just then at a loss for words.

John Dufresne

#28. For all laws are general judgements, or sentences of the legislator; as also every particular judgement is a law to him whose case is judged.

Thomas Hobbes

#29. 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

#30. How do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Say nothing at all for months on end, then kill me dead in three sentences?

Garrett Leigh

#31. And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings - the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.

Simon Winchester

#32. 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

#33. This little book aims to introduce the Thai language. It is intended for those who know nothing about it, but are keen to learn. We use the method of selecting 100 key words, and using these to make up sentences and present a range of expressions, so that you can "say 1000 things.

Stuart O. Robson

#34. All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.

Oscar Wilde

#35. {Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own.

Norman Lock

#36. The pressure isn't on my brain, but on my mouth. I realized Sam Malone said very little, he spoke in little sentences. Which is much more comfortable for me for some reason.

Ted Danson

#37. I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects - a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd - and compose them like sentences.

Michael Craig-Martin

#38. --'What did Mum want?'
--'She said not to give away the milk for free.'
--'You're not livestock. Go out with me?'
--Not two sentences I've ever heard used together before.

Emily Evans

#39. I didn't understand that you could go to jail for the rest of your life for selling cocaine. I thought life sentences were for murderers. I didn't know that you could get it for supplying something to someone that they asked you for.

Rick Ross

#40. Flora hadn't signed my yearbook. When I got it back from the cheerleaders, I skimmed over the last few pages and saw that every one of them signed except for her. I was disappointed but I wasn't surprised.

We were too much of everything to be summed up in a few sentences. -Sean Foster

Rainbowbrook

#41. Regarding children's literature, look for interesting content and well-constructed sentences clothed in literary language. The imagination should be warmed and the book should hold the interest of the child. Life's too short to spend time with books that bore us.

Deborah Taylor-Hough

#42. I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.

Nick Cave

#43. All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for?

C.S. Friedman

#44. Don't ever take advice from anyone who starts a sentence with, 'You may not like me for this, but it's for your own good - ' It never is.

Lois Wyse

#45. What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.

Yann Martel

#46. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

Jonathan Lethem

#47. For some people, their idea of getting tough is longer suspended sentences.

Jeremy Larner

#48. 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

#49. Smart on Crime says if you commit violent crimes, you should go to jail, and go to jail for extended periods of time. For people who are engaged in non-violent crimes - any crimes, for that matter - we are looking for sentences that are proportionate to the conduct that you engaged in.

Eric Holder

#50. Each character requires different language, and these issues become inseparable. You have all these balls in the air: language, character, narrative. For me, the primary focus must be words, sentences, paragraphs.

Dana Spiotta

#51. A constant discomfort derives from this--writing these sentences, or any other for that matter--I am writing an ad for the war. With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.

Semezdin Mehmedinovic

#52. The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

B.F. Skinner

#53. If you become a writer you'll be trying to describe the ?Thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across.

C.S. Lewis

#54. Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

Barry Hannah

#55. After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper.

Michael Cox

#56. If you are forced to describe things for someone else, it sharpens your senses. And also your sense of how hard it is to make the translation from the vibrant, multi-faceted world to a sentence that distils it.

Judith Thurman

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

Gilles Deleuze

#60. so many theological terms, words like 'monotheism' are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them, and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology,

N. T. Wright

#61. The chief characteristic of English grammar is the way words are arranged within sentences, and the technical term for this process is syntax. It

David Crystal

#62. I wait for him to announce my presence, holding his gaze, refusing to look away, determined that this beautiful boy see the face he sentences to death with this next words.

Sophie Jordan

#63. I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'l have a book. It is such a pleasurable moment that I type many more title pages than I could ever use.

Betsy Byars

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

Brian Kiley

#65. My sentence is for open war.

John Milton

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

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

Kamala Harris

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

Polly Toynbee

#75. 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

#76. For me, the big chore is always the same: how to begin a sentence, how to continue it, how to complete it.

Claude Simon

#77. 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

#78. Short isolated sentences were the mode in which ancient Wisdom delighted to convey its precepts, for the regulation of life and manners.

William Warburton

#79. I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

Christopher Hitchens

#80. I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there's something more to say.

Aimee Bender

#81. I'm rarely at a loss for words outside the library. But within its walls I'm required to form sentences that no logical person should ever have to utter, for instance, You can't sleep on the floor at the library under your blanket.

Josh Hanagarne

#82. Mainly, when I ran into Emmylou Harris, that was it, you know? We could finish each other's sentences musically, and personally, too. We have a very shared, similar sensibility. And that was a friendship that really opened up a tremendous number of musical doors for me.

Linda Ronstadt

#83. I remember my wife in white.' It just made people weep to hear it ... Everybody just thought it was the saddest sentence that was ever written. And it didn't matter if I never wrote another word. This one sentence had put an end to the need for any future sentences. I had said it all.

Carolyn Parkhurst

#84. It was terrible and awful when someone left you. You could move on, do the best you could, but like Eli had said, an ending was an ending. No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have to have the last word.

Sarah Dessen

#85. The sentence must also contain its own apology for being spoken.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#86. Sentences in which I have tried for a certain light tone
many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child.

Elizabeth Hardwick

#87. Take your hands off my sentences, asshole. I sweat blood for that shit.

Scott Adlerberg

#88. [for indicted foreigners] simple expulsion is not enough ( ... ) they must be arrested immediately, tried using a fast-track procedure, and then expelled to serve their sentences in the countries they came from, ( ... ) it isn't right that foreign criminals are being housed in our [Italian] jails.

Franco Frattini

#89. Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.

Joseph Campbell

#90. His sentences didn't seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action.

Jennifer Crusie

#91. You don't think when you play music, you just try to play and be in it. It is the same for me when the writing is going really well. It's the same kind of feeling. I'm just in it. It's not the words, it's not the sentences, I'm not aware of it. Then it's good.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#92. We are but beginners now in spiritual education; for although we have learned the first letters of the alphabet, we cannot read words yet, much less can we put sentences together; but as one says, "He that has been in heaven but five minutes, knows more than the general assembly of divines on earth.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#93. It is impossible to know for certain how many innocent drug defendants convict themselves every year by accepting a plea bargain out of fear of mandatory sentences,

Michelle Alexander

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. Words were insufficient for the elevation of his [Mr Collins'] feelings; and he was obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite civility and truth in a few short sentences.

Jane Austen

#97. I sum up the prospects for 1967 in three short sentences. We are back on course. The ship is picking up speed. The economy is moving. Every seaman knows the command at such a moment: 'steady as she goes'.

James Callaghan

#98. I have many stories which don't make it to the computer. When I put it into the computer I make some changes and often add a few sentences here and there. I like the typewriter for first drafts because it means you can't change anything right away, you just have to put it all down.

Arthur Bradford

#99. I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I've used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn't decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough.

Steven Millhauser

#100. Someone should take a vacuum cleaner to his sentences.

John Searles