Top 100 The Sentence Quotes
#2. When I say a spoken Hebrew sentence, half of it is like the King James Bible and half of it is a hip-hop lyric. It has a roller-coaster effect.
Etgar Keret
#3. It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.
Richard Bach
#4. How To Read This Book
If you're reading this sentence then you've pretty much got it. Good job. Just keep going the way you are.
Demetri Martin
#5. The verdict of this court is that the accused are guilty of witchcraft. The maximum penalty the law allows is to be burned to death.However, in view of your previous good background I am disposed to be lenient. I therefore sentence you to be burned alive.
Richard Curtis
#6. 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
#7. Now, with the message sent, the words said, she wanted to call them back, to censor, to rearrange them, to make a prettier sentence, a fairer explanation of her soul.
Ray Bradbury
#8. 'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader.
Jonathan Raban
#9. It would be tedious to attempt a phonetic reproduction of Mr. Sage's utterances. Enough to say that they were genteel to a fantastic degree. "Aye thot Aye heeard somewon teeking may neem in veen," may give some idea of his rendering of the above sentence. Let it go at that.
Anonymous
#10. Where did you find the whipped cream?" he asked. "You had milk, I had science," said Jack. "It's amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence. Cheese making, for example. The perfect intersection of milk, science, and foolish disregard for the laws of nature.
Seanan McGuire
#11. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.
John Green
#12. I remember hating having to cross over the Broadway Bridge again, having to leave the peninsula neighborhood and go back to my apartment in downtown Boston.
Michael Patrick MacDonald
#13. Forget I ever referred to my mother and screwing in the same sentence. That's just ... wrong. On so many levels.
Emma Chase
#14. It is not easy to stand at the bar of public opinion and receive the verdict of condemnation; but what will it be to stand at the bar of God who is greater than all, and to receive from him the sentence of damnation.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#15. The script of 'Shogun' was so tight that you could not take a word out of a sentence, you could not take a sentence out of a scene, and you certainly couldn't take out a scene without putting ripples right through the back or the front of the overall story.
John Rhys-Davies
#16. There is no one way to render an idea. Let's explore how masters of the sentence play with length and style to make their sentences distinctive.
Constance Hale
#17. She was the book that was not written. The sentence that was not scripted. She was the word you wished you could have said.
Lang Leav
#18. He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.
David Halberstam
#19. Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
William Gibson
#20. 'I am' is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that 'I do' is the longest sentence?
George Carlin
#21. Too many!' James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.
Susan Cooper
#22. Today, in the newspapers and magazines, the first sentence is, my restaurant is expensive.
Masa Takayama
#23. One senses with so many Democrats who support the Clintons an unspoken sentence: "They're all we have." They're the only big national winners the party has left. I always want to say to them: That's not true, you've got better than that, you've got good people, go look and you will find them.
Peggy Noonan
#24. Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search ... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.
Italo Calvino
#25. Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
Siri Hustvedt
#26. I want people who have received a diagnosis of Hepatitis C to know that they didn't just receive a death sentence. They do have options, even if the person who gave them their diagnosis isn't aware of all of them. The path they choose doesn't have to be one of desperation.
Melody Beattie
#27. The writers of religious scriptures and texts would have done humanity a grand service if they would have used just one sentence, in one of the pages out of the thousands, to support respectful and peaceful disagreement.
Steve Maraboli
#28. At last, the luminous match was struck and the day was lit.
Dorit Rabinyan
#29. That was the real sentence imposed upon him, he thought - to discover what idea, what simple idea available to the simplest man, had made mankind accept the doctrines that led it to self-destruction.
Ayn Rand
#30. Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.
Stanley Fish
#31. As mortal humans we are born with a death sentence anyway, so what difference does a little poison make? Why not take a chance you will survive the ordeal and make something significant of your life? ... p330
Brian Herbert
#32. Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.
Thomas Bernhard
#33. This is the end, Fuka-Eri informed him in a whisper. One sentence, as always. Time stopped, and the world ended. The earth ground slowly to a halt, and all sound and light vanished.
Haruki Murakami
#34. Have you noticed the words which Old Testament people use when someone important calls them by name? They don't say "What?" or "Yes?" They answer with the curious sentence, "Here I am". So much is in that sentence: readiness to respond, a willing servitude, an offering of oneself to the other.
Walter Wangerin Jr.
#35. Virginia Woolf had to ask herself How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears the shingles in the bottom of the reader's soul?
Virginia Woolf
#36. My wife and I spent the winter in Worcestershire. This allowed me to tell everyone back home in the States, 'We are wintering in Worcestershire.' This may be a sentence that has never actually been uttered in human history, even by people who spend all their winters in Worcestershire.
Christopher Buckley
#37. I can't really put it in one sentence because although on one hand Preacher is about faith and yes it is also about, I suppose, the search for God, the search for faith and the manipulation and the abuse committed by figures in whom I suppose people have faith.
Garth Ennis
#38. My heart is a schizophrenic. One sentence is about how I hate him. The next is about how much I love him. It goes on like that, back and forth, pacing.
Lesley Anne Cowan
#40. Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read.
"Sure," Sammy said, "I never said I had anything against reading books ... "
"The publishers will be relieved to know that," I tried to insert, but Sammy was too quick for me and was already rounding the bend of his next sentence.
Budd Schulberg
#41. ... I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they're lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.
Grace Paley
#42. PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job.
Max Levchin
#43. Baby, groaned the guy-Ted? Tad?-something like that-and crushed his lips against the side of her neck, shoving her face against the wall of the toilet stall.
Jennifer Weiner
#44. He's the 'him' in every sentence that really matters; he's the 'he' in every song.
Emery Lord
#45. Write the truest sentence you know. Then write another."
Hemingway's advice to other young writers in "A Moveable Feast.
Ernest Hemingway,
#46. Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.
Woody Allen
#47. After years spent in Washington, I have become more aware than ever of the government's ineptness and the likelihood of its making mistakes. I no longer trust the U.S. government to invoke and carry out a death sentence under any conditions.
Ron Paul
#48. I began to parse the sentence. This is what English majors do. It's what we're trained to do. We don't know how to do anything else, except drive cabs.
Gary Reilly
#49. Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty,
Maggie Nelson
#51. Justification is the truly dramatic transition from the status of a condemned criminal awaiting a terrible sentence to that of an heir awaiting a fabulous inheritance.
J.I. Packer
#52. In a single sentence the moral is: admit that complexity always increases, first from the model you fit to the data, thence to the model you use to think about and plan about the experiment and its analysis, and thence to the true situation.
John Tukey
#53. And everything that comes out of my mouth is gonna be repeated in two-sentence-long bites for the next years of my life. Certain words travel far and wide.
Cory Monteith
#54. Wretchedness. It is atrociously unfair, of course, that the Baudelaires have so many troubles, but that is the way the story goes. So now that I've told you that the first sentence will be The Baudelaire
Lemony Snicket
#55. Manny Pacquiao I'm calling you out let's fight May 5th and give the world what they want to see. My Jail Sentence was pushed back because the date was locked in. Step up Punk.
Floyd Mayweather Jr.
#56. The sentence pulsates, moves in and out, toward the character and away from her - when we reach "huddled" we are reminded that an author allowed us to merge with his character, that the author's magniloquent style is the envelope within which this generous contract is carried.
James Wood
#57. Surely few if any readers have come across the sentence they are now reading, and someone who had by chance heard or seen it could not possibly remember such a fact.
Noam Chomsky
#58. I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#59. Stavia saw herself as in a picture, from the outside, a darkly cloaked figure moving along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain.
Sheri S. Tepper
#60. The Koran claims for itself that it is "mubeen," or clear. But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesnt make sense. Many Muslims and Orientalists will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible.
Gerd R. Puin
#61. I sort through the letters and pull out what I need for the beginning. They snap easily into place. And even though I thought I would need every letter, I finish the first sentence and realize that it's all I have left to say.
I MISS YOU.
Nina LaCour
#62. Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant.
Brenda Ueland
#63. 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
#64. Stop using victim language like, 'because I am a woman' and 'being a woman is hard because' at the start of every sentence about your success or lack of.
Dawn O'Porter
#65. The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#66. I am always worried that over-planning and outlining will kill the magic of writing; most of the world I created in 'California' occurred via good old sexy sentence-making.
Edan Lepucki
#67. There may be thousands of principles of Marxism, but in the final analysis they can be summed up in one sentence: Rebellion is justified.
Mao Zedong
#68. 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
#69. The perfect story is one you can retell in three minutes, and every single sentence is interesting.
Malik Bendjelloul
#70. There's an old folk saying that goes: whenever you delete a sentence from your NaNoWriMo novel, a NaNoWriMo angel loses its wings and plummets, screaming, to the ground. Where it will likely require medical attention.
Chris Baty
#71. 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
#72. What will the greatest experiment discover? I have no idea!, maybe nothing!, If we won't check, we will never know. In science there is never a guarantee of success. If you understood this last sentence, then you understood the most important message of this lecture.
Nathan Seiberg
#73. Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into sentence: Be True! Be True! Be True! Show freely to the world if not the worst, yet some trait whereby the worst can be inferred.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#74. That which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery: it is probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species.
David Hume
#75. I asked the indefatigable Betty White what she was going to do when she got home. She told me she was going to fix herself a "vodka on the rocks and eat a cold hot dog." In one sentence, she proved my theory and made me excited for my future.
Amy Poehler
#76. I still have a stammer that I can control by not opening a sentence with a hard consonant, or by concentrating for a moment, breathing softly down. Growing up, the 'Our Father' was lovely, made for me, the 'Hail Mary' was gorgeous, and 'Glory Be to the Father' was an absolute nightmare.
Colm Toibin
#77. When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
John Irving
#78. But I will say that living in Ireland has changed the cadence and fullness of speech, since the Irish love words and use as many of them in a sentence as possible.
Anne McCaffrey
#79. If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication.
Stephen Covey
#80. Retirement isn't a goal; it's a sentence.
Ari Gold
#81. She was being like those bratty girls in movies from the 1980s, and my mom kept saying "Young Lady" after every sentence.
Stephen Chbosky
#82. The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows.
Stanley Fish
#83. The blank face of the moon looked down wistfully on the pair and tried to lean in just a little closer.
S.E. Grove
#84. They stole you from me. They took you away for seven years. Your entire lifetime. A life sentence. The waiting has been endless. The watching. The planning. Now, finally, I'm almost ready. I've got a few things to take care of and then we can be reunited.
Sanjida Kay
#85. 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
#86. Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.
Alfred North Whitehead
#87. My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
Vladimir Nabokov
#88. Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
Bertrand Russell
#89. She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#90. Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not from the sentence.
Victor Hugo
#91. Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
Terry Pratchett
#92. Writing a long sentence is like watching a soccer player in slow motion as he kicks the ball across the field, as I leave a trail of dots and loops behind me.
James Rumford
#93. The New Testament never simply says, "Remember Jesus Christ." That is a half-finished sentence. It says, "Remember Jesus Christ is risen from the dead."
Robert Runcie
#94. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.
Augustine Of Hippo
#95. There is no minimum length for a sentence that's acceptable in the eyes of God.
William Zinsser
#96. But, when he saw that glint of happiness in his father's eyes in the middle of his sentence, he decided that he wanted it to stay that way.
Diyar Harraz
#97. The apostle Paul never seemed to exhaust the topic of grace - what makes us think we can? He just kept coming at it and coming at it from another angle. That's the thing about grace. It's like springtime. You can't put it in a single sentence definition, and you can't exhaust it.
Max Lucado
#98. The rig began shaking like caffeine withdrawal." --Opening sentence of THE FURY.
"The duct-taped Buick swam north on Rush Street, hunting whores like a lesser white shark." --First sentence of Chapter One, THE FURY
Shane Gericke
#99. The righteousness of God in His election means, then, that as a righteous Judge God perceives and estimates as such the lost cause of the creature, and that in spite of its opposition He gives sentence in its favour, fashioning for it His own righteousness.
Karl Barth
#100. The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
