Sentences Quotes - Page 2

• I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.

  Louis Begley

  Writing, Thinking, Self

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• I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.

  Rick Bass

  Real, Thinking, People

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• We put together a one-sentence petition asking Congress to censure President Clinton and move on to other pressing issues. We sent it to under 100 friends and family, and within a week we had 100,000 people sign the petition.

  Joan Blades

  Moving, Issues, People

  "MoveOn as an Instrument of the People". Interview with Terrence McNally, www.alternet.org. June 24, 2004.

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• 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

  Reading, Yield, Giving

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• If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written - either good or bad - you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters.

  Lynda Barry

  Writing, Fate, Order

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• I'm so uncomfortable, especially in emotional situations, having to say sentences that don't feel right. As an actor - or really, as any kind of person sensitive to it.

  Franka Potente

  Emotional, Actors, Kind

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

  Tom Perrotta

  Lost Love, School, Stories

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• I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.

  Ron Rash

  Decision, Stories, Dozen

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• Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself.

  Joseph Joubert

  Book, Writing, Ambition

  "The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert". Book by Joseph Joubert, translated by Paul Auster, 2005.

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• In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

  Amy Tan

  Writing, Fiction, Rewards

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• It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Giving, Faithful

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• In Washington, I found myself as a 31-year-old in a room with the president, vice president, and secretaries of state and defense, and I was unfazed by it. But get me around a rock star I grew up with and I have trouble completing sentences.

  Joe Scarborough

  Stars, Rocks, Years

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• You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin, and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into.

  Anne Bernays

  Giving Up, Character, Writing

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• The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer - carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come.

  Naomi Novik

  Notebook, Coffee, Writing

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• Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

  Donald Hall

  Writing, Light, Hands

  Donald Hall (2004). “Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected”, p.50, University of Michigan Press

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• I refuse to imprison our acts in the rigid mould of sentences.

  Ella Maillart

  Mould, Refuse

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• I've been accused of not really paying attention to a sentence unless my name comes up in it twice.

  Matthew Perry

  Names, Attention, Come Up

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

  Roland Barthes

  Falling In Love, Memories, Desire

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

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• Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

  James Patterson

  Writing, Trying, Stories

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• I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my painting, and improve my sentence structure. If I can make a living doing that stuff, that's great, and I will keep doing it, and they can do whatever they want with my image. I couldn't care less.

  William T. Vollmann

  Beautiful, Falling In Love, Race

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• I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.

  William Zinsser

  Thinking, Ends, Fine Things

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• In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Children, Mean, Blessing

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2014). “Suffering, Suicide and Immortality: Eight Essays from The Parerga”, p.3, Courier Corporation

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• I think Yelena Akhtiorskaya is a genius. What she manages to do, linguistically and emotionally, in the span of a single sentence, is astonishing.

  Keith Gessen

  Thinking, Genius, Manage

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• If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be 'Shut up and calculate!'

  David Mermin

  Would Be, Shut Up, Copenhagen

  N. David Mermin (2016). “Why Quark Rhymes with Pork: And Other Scientific Diversions”, p.38, Cambridge University Press

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• If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

  Adam Haslett

  Bars, Shooting, Indecision

  "How To Write a (Good) Sentence" by Adam Haslett, www.slate.com. January 23, 2011.

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