Sentence Quotes

1. "Every sentence I could think of has already been said a hundred times over, by people whose words come out perfect and beautifully formed, where mine die on the tongue or straggle out onto the page, mangled and imperfect. But my story isn't perfect, because I'm not perfect. Nothing is perfect except maybe in math, in the line that extends forever in both directions. Math is beautiful, I have always known that, but so is life. And I have grown to accept imperfection."
Author: Aubrey Rose

2. "Variation on the middle sentence: A thing is not necessarily false because it is badly expressed, nor true because it is expressed magnificently."
Author: Augustine Of Hippo

3. "Because if he wasn't really, really careful, Lori Sullivan was just going to keep stealing his heartone sentence, one meal, one smile at time"
Author: Bella Andre

4. "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"
Author: Brian Herbert

5. "Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death."
Author: Cat Stevens

6. "Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . ."
Author: Dennis R. Miller

7. "A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no words written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished because undisturbed: and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided."
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

8. "She had a brief affair with a novelist, W. L. River, whose Death of a Young Man had been published several years earlier. He called her Motsie and pledged himself to her in letters composed of stupendously long run-on sentences, in one case seventy-four lines of single-spaced typewriting. At the time this passed for experimental prose. "I want nothing from life except you," he wrote. "I want to be with you forever, to work and write for you, to live wherever you want to live, to love nothing, nobody but you, to love you with the passion of earth but also with the above earthly elements of more eternal, spiritual love.…"He did not, however, get his wish."
Author: Erik Larson

9. "Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature but one's own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence."
Author: F.L. Lucas

10. "There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

11. "A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?"
Author: George Orwell

12. "I'm very polite by nature, even the voices in my head let each other finish their sentences."
Author: Graham Parke

13. "This is the end of our sentence"
Author: Grant Morrison

14. "...[W]riting stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation. A world could be made in five pages....The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically empathic sentence, falling in love would be achieved in a single word—a glance."
Author: Ian McEwan

15. "Iggy Pop looks right at me as he sings the line: 'America takes drugs in psychic defence'; only he changes 'America' to 'Scatlin', and defines us mair accurately in a single sentence than all the others have ever done."
Author: Irvine Welsh

16. "I looked into his eyes and then down at his mouth before continuing. "Have you ever noticed how pretty and beautiful words can be? How easy it is to say the things you think someone wants to hear. How you can affect a person's entire day with just a few measly sentences?"My slight smile dropped. "But when you don't follow them up with any action, they're completely pointless. They're just sounds and syllables. But they mean absolutely nothing." My gaze glossed over as my mind wandered."
Author: J. Sterling

17. "My mother thought me being gay was a death sentence."
Author: Jai Rodriguez

18. "He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense."
Author: James Joyce

19. "I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method."
Author: James Thurber

20. "Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly."
Author: Jean Baudrillard

21. "It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I."
Author: Jean Paul Sartre

22. "I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people."
Author: Jennifer Donnelly

23. "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."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

24. "Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write."
Author: Jincy Willett

25. "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."
Author: John Berger

26. "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.'"
Author: Josefina Vazquez Mota

27. "Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins."
Author: Jules Renard

28. "I had plenty of time,' he said, telling himself that was one of the saddest sentences there is."
Author: Laurence Cossé

29. "The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close."
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson

30. "Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book's first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains."
Author: Lemony Snicket

31. "Michael gave her the five-sentence rundown. "A fluid-borne disease made the dead come back to life. They like to attack the living. There are hundreds of them out there. The only way to kill them is to get them in the head with a weapon. There's a good chance we're all going to die."Vespertine was quiet for a moment before saying, with her usual coolness, "That will be engraved on a plaque someday, sir.I vote you Poet Laureate of the Undebuted Set."
Author: Lia Habel

32. "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."
Author: Lionel Trilling

33. "What if others-adults-had, upon becoming Twelves, received in their instructions the same terrifying sentence? What if they had all been instructed: You may lie?"
Author: Lois Lowry

34. "No its you," she said. How far away her voice sounded, as though it had traveled to London already, ahead of her. "Your ducal self assurance. Everything will give way to you. Even Satan's own storm.""You are definitely improving," he said. "Full mocking sentences."
Author: Loretta Chase

35. "I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English?it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them?then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."
Author: Mark Twain

36. "The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences."
Author: Markus Zusak

37. "... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."
Author: Milan Kundera

38. "Hot, short, thorough," I said. I hesitated before adding, "Please." It never pays to insult computers that are smart enough to form sentences. Not when they're in control of the locks, and especially when they have the capacity to boil you in bleach."Absolutely," said the shower."
Author: Mira Grant

39. "One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence."
Author: Nick Hornby

40. "They lay together like a word and a comma, asleep within an unfinished sentence."
Author: Patricia Storace

41. "Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

42. "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."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

43. "The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work."
Author: Robert Frost

44. "I'm crap at interviews. I'm just not very good at sentences."
Author: Rupert Graves

45. "I read on the back cover that the author was born in Russia and came to America when she was young. She barely spoke English, but she wanted to be a great writer. I thought that was very admirable, so I sat down and tried to write a story. "Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight." That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn't think of the next one."
Author: Stephen Chbosky

46. "The world of publishing is in crisis. It's no coincidence that the worst published writer in the world today is also one of the world's most successful writers... Dan Brown. Now Dan Brown is not a good writer, The Da Vinci Code is not literature. Dan Brown writes sentences like "The famous man looked at the red cup." ...and it's only to be hoped that Dan Brown never gets a job where he's required to break bad news. "Doctor is he going to be alright?" "The seventy five year old man died a painful death on the large green table... it was sad"."
Author: Stewart Lee

47. "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."
Author: Ted Danson

48. "Reading is performance. The reader-- the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk-- performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

49. "Supposedly Kaidan's having a difficult time 'cause he can't say swear words in every sentence," Marna said with a smile. "He's determined to find signs for cursing or make some up himself."
Author: Wendy Higgins

50. "It is time to browse through the precious books that have meant the most to you that you may rediscover illuminating phrases and sentences to light your pathway to the future..."
Author: Wilferd Peterson

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