Top 100 Sentences In Quotes
#1. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?
Edgar Degas
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Abby: In another life, I could love you.
Travis: I might love you you in this one.
Jamie McGuire
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.
Tom Robbins
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.
John Adams
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together.
You can do it.
Sherman Alexie
#47. 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
#48. Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.
Lauren Oliver
#49. I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.
Ernest Hemingway,
#50. I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences.
Antjie Krog
#51. Such sentences always end in silence, no matter how they may begin--indeed, this is the very essence of fate: that which we never quite manage to say.
Matthew Flaming
#52. When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.
Ben Lerner
#53. From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.
Noam Chomsky
#54. God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences, let me someday see who I am.
Sylvia Plath
#55. only because language has something in common with the world that it can be used to picture the world, so it is only because of logic that our sentences have meaning at all.
Dan Cryan
#56. Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway.
Karen Thompson Walker
#57. The strength behind communication is in its quality, not in its quantity. Your talk should be that of quality, not of quantity. You should use small sentences which say a lot. Or you should say a lot in small sentences.
Harbhajan Singh Yogi
#58. "What Thou wilt, when Thou wilt, how Thou wilt." I had rather speak these three sentences from my heart in my mother tongue than be master of all the languages in Europe.
John Newton
#59. What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
Jonathan Miller
#60. In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.
Douglas Coupland
#61. If I was to interrupt this article every few sentences, asking you whether or not I was making a good impression on you, I hope and believe that you would think I was a servile jerk. Yet this is what our politicians are doing in every speech.
Christopher Hitchens
#62. You can do it."
"I can do it."
Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together.
Sherman Alexie
#63. There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.
Julio Cortazar
#64. As I build sentences, I roll them sometimes on my mouth to taste them as I write them. I have this emptying of the mind and the focusing on that single thing, that infinitesimal moment and there is perfection, you know, as if I exist fully in that nanosecond of emotion.
Trinity Jones
#65. While my scarcely controlled rage flew from my mouth in sentences I hoped would be, perhaps not then but perhaps later, like knives to her brain.
Lorrie Moore
#66. In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they're going to end.
Daniel Wallace
#67. 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
#68. A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words ... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.
J.L. Austin
#69. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.
Ray Bradbury
#70. 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
#72. The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of 'eternity'; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#73. Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.
A.J. Ayer
#74. Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society - to help solve our contemporary problems - seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
Jonathan Franzen
#75. His sentences are in homely English, and yet there is something Roman in the easy handling of clauses, and something Greek in their ascent from analogy to idea.
Jocelyn Gibb
#76. Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#77. She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
Michael Ondaatje
#78. Her sentences were icebergs, with just the tip of her thought coming out of her mouth, and the rest kept up in her head, which I was starting to think was more and more beautiful the longer I looked at her.
Gregory Galloway
#79. People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.
Stanley Fish
#80. 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
#81. The worst way to read, he said, is with the thought that you do not have enough time. The only way to read is in the knowledge that there is an infinite amount of time stretching ahead, and that if one wishes to taste only afew sentences per day one is free to do so.
Gabriel Josipovici
#82. Solely in the world of languages is the amateur of value. Well-intentioned sentences full of mistakes can still build bridges between people.
Kato Lomb
#83. The "if I had time" lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Sentences can happen in a moment. Enough stolen moments, enough stolen sentences, and a novel is born - without the luxury of time.
Julia Cameron
#84. The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.
Mary Karr
#85. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#86. At least half of his hunters writhed on the ground with grubs already inside them, causing horrendous agony. These had to be helped away by terrified Ship People whose courage lay trembling in their hearts as lightly as leaves.
Peadar O'Guilin
#87. I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.
Orhan Pamuk
#88. How do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Say nothing at all for months on end, then kill me dead in three sentences?
Garrett Leigh
#89. Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#90. Whenever people ask me what the story is for my next film, I won't tell and people feel it's because I'm being secretive or something, but it's actually because I'm ashamed to sum up a film in three sentences.
Abbas Kiarostami
#91. 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
#92. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.
Bertrand Russell
#93. Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#94. I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.
Per Petterson
#95. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.
Etheridge Knight
#96. I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#97. A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
John Irving
#98. If you stop to think about it, you'll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.
Michael Ende
#99. When I'm choosing things, there's a level of intelligence I want to peel off, whether it's written in terribly simple sentences, whether it's from the point of view of a dog, or a 15-year-old boy.
Lynne Tillman
#100. That is not an adequate response, faerie," he growled. His Power lay in the room, a heavy brooding presence. "I require a series of words strung together that make coherent sentences.
Thea Harrison
