Sentences Quotes

1. "A handwritten letter carries a lot of risk. It's a one-sided conversation that reveals the truth of the writer. Furthermore, the writer is not there to see the reaction of the person he writes to, so there's a great unknown to the process that requires a leap of faith. The writer has to choose the right words to express his sentences, and then, once he has sealed the envelope, he has to place those thoughts in the hands of someone else, trusting that the feelings will be delivered, and that the recipient will understand the writer's intent. How childish to think that could be easy."
Author: Adriana Trigiani

2. "I nodded. "Where's your hunter?" She flinched. "He went home. We thought it would be best." Her eyes went from worried to warning. "He's under Drake protection." "So am I, or so I've been led to understand.""Of course you are," Lucy said, her nose pressed to the window. "Misunderstanding. No big deal."Solange quirked a half smile. "You might try complete sentences, Lucy.""Can't. Busy." I was curious despite myself. "What are you doing?" "Drooling," Solange explained fondly."
Author: Alyxandra Harvey

3. "To get a true sense of the book, I have to spend a few moments inside. I'll glance at the first couple pages, then flip around to somewhere in the middle, see if the language matches me somehow. It's like dating, only with sentences......It could be something as simple yet weirdly potent as a single word (tangerine). We're meant to be, that sentence and me. And when it happens, you just know."
Author: Amy Krouse Rosenthal

4. "But then why, when talking on the phone, did they quarrel, on average at least once every four sentences? Maybe, though the inspector, it was an effect of the distance between them becoming less and less tolerable with each passing day, since as we grow old - for every now and then one must, yes, look reality in the eye and call things by their proper names - we feel more keenly the need to have the person we love beside us."
Author: Andrea Camilleri

5. "She stopped at a red light and turned to face him. "Look. You must know your eyes are truly distracting, and you keep LOOKING at me. I've also never talked to anyone who sounds like a movie trailer announcer before. Your voice is so cool. I'm sure you know that. It's probably part of your famousness. But here in this car it's unsettling, because I have this sensation you might suddenly begin sentences with some dramatic start." She lowered her voice. "like...IN A WORLD, FAR, FAR AWAY..."
Author: Anne Eliot

6. "Always have a purpose,' his father used to tell him. 'Act like you're heading someplace purposeful, and none of the low-life will mess with you.' He had also said, 'Never trust a man who starts his sentences with "Frankly,"' and 'Nine tenths of a good sidearm pitch is in the flick of the wrist,' and 'If you want to sell a person something, look off elsewhere as you're speaking, not straight into his eyes."
Author: Anne Tyler

7. "You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write."
Author: Annie Proulx

8. "There was the place where all the shouted words fall into the water. They're too weak to make it from shore to shore. I saw the words underwater, millions of them; they're lying there on the bottom of the sea, a whole load of wrecked sentences, sentences that never reached their destination, questions from one side and answers from the other…"
Author: Antonia Michaelis

9. "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."
Author: Barry Hannah

10. "I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I've conjured images of a bleak site years ago. Here in this room, I suppose, is to be found the interior world of the book; but it opens upon a world beyond the windows, where no event has been collapsed into syntax, where the vocabulary, it seems, is infinite. The indispensable connection for me lies with the open space (of the open window ajar year round, never closed) that lets the breath of every winter storm, the ripping wind and its pelting rain, enter the room."
Author: Barry Lopez

11. "At first we had so much to catch up on we were talking a hundred words a second, barely even listening to the ends of one another's sentences before moving onto the next. And there was laughing. Lots of laughing. Then the laughing stopped and there was this silence. What the hell was it?It was like the world stopped turning in that instant. Like everyone around us had disappeared. Like everything at home was forgotten about. It was as if those few minutes on this world were created just for us and all we could do was look at each other. It was like he was seeing my face for the first time. He looked confused but kind of amused. Exactly how I felt. Because I was sitting on the grass with my best friend Alex, and that was my best friend Alex's face and nose and eyes and lips, but they seemed different. So I kissed him. I seized the moment and I kissed him,"
Author: Cecelia Ahern

12. "If you start most of your sentences with 'Why Can't', 'Why Not', or 'What if', you'll build a stronger imagination."
Author: Corey Aaron Burkes

13. "Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions."
Author: Don DeLillo

14. "According to Wallace, the expectation that art amuses is a 'poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with,' since it places all of the power with the audience, sometimes breeding resentment on the part of the author. 'I can see it in myself and in other young writers,' he told McCaffery: 'this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.' Wallace expressed his 'hostility' by writing unwieldy sentences, refusing to fulfill readers' expectations, and 'bludgeoning the reader with data'--all strategies he used to wrestle back some of the power held by modern audiences."
Author: Dorothy M. Kennedy

15. "Writing is like sculpturing words out of a block of imagination. Sentences chisel the story, then characters make it their own."
Author: Federico Chini

16. "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

17. "The words of the world want to make sentences."
Author: Gaston Bachelard

18. "He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. 'You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.' It was as if in choosing that passage, he were transmitting a signal of defiance to both the services. The last word of the message, when it was decoded by Boris or another, would read 'goodbye."
Author: Graham Greene

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

20. "Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance."
Author: Gustave Flaubert

21. "Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts."
Author: Henry Sweet

22. "You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book."
Author: Italo Calvino

23. "Things got out of hand. It happens." My brows flew up. "It happens? Often? Do you just walk around and happen to end up kissing girls? Do you slip and fall on girls' mouths? If so, that's got to be an awkward life to live." "Well . . ." The quirk to his lips was mischievous and teasing, but I was so not having it. He sighed. "Tess, you're a beautiful girl and I'm a guy and—" "Oh, shut up." His eyes widened. "Don't even finish what will most likely be the lamest sentence in the history of lame sentences. You're attracted to me."
Author: J. Lynn

24. "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

25. "You can't not like 'The Great Gatsby.' It's got the best sentences in, like, ever."
Author: John Green

26. "We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day."
Author: Jonathan Lethem

27. "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

28. "I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them."
Author: Karen Thompson Walker

29. "I don't want to spoil the magic, but it's a very curious thing that honestly baffles me. It's the nearest we'll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is a bit odd. Other aspects you work out more - you rework sentences, you rework imagery. But not characters."
Author: Kate Atkinson

30. "I thought back to Meg's advice about Hemingway sentences—simple declarative statements that showed the truth and distilled the meaning. My first attempt at that had been cynical and messed up. I gave it a go again.Find one lost sheep.The angels rejoice."
Author: Laura Anderson Kurk

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

32. "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

33. "Romney spent the next twenty-four hours with McCain, traipsing with him from Manchester to Peterborough to Salem, agog at his inability to complete three sentences without dropping an f-bomb. (Romney employed prim substitutes for profanities: "blooming" for "fucking," "grunt" for "shit.")"
Author: Mark Halperin

34. "Sentences are like just caught fish. Spunky today, stinky tomorrow."
Author: Max Lucado

35. "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."
Author: Michael Ende

36. "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. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follw the pen that is guiding and supporting me."
Author: Muriel Barbery

37. "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

38. "For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conservationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. 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. If the Chicano intellectuals which to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall."
Author: Ray Bradbury

39. "Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way."
Author: Richard Rorty

40. "Perhaps the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words.We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered; and he may therefore be justly numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the mind."
Author: Samuel Johnson

41. "I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period)."
Author: Sarah Vowell

42. "If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction."
Author: Scott Turow

43. "Now yet again I discover I do not have the language, the lingo, to talk to her about this, or about anything. We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach."
Author: Sebastian Barry

44. "We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time."
Author: Stephen Hawking

45. "Alarmed, I realized what my visceral reaction implied: jealousy. Over a guy I barely knew, with whom I'd exchanged more saliva than sentences."
Author: Tammara Webber

46. "The teachings of the Buddha could be summarized in four short sentences. ... [The Buddha] said ...The bad things, don't do them.The good things, try to do them.Try to purify, subdue your own mind.That is the teaching of all buddhas."
Author: Thích Nhất Hạnh

47. "At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books."
Author: Umberto Eco

48. "I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them."
Author: Virginia Woolf

49. "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

50. "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind."
Author: Wolcott Gibbs

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